WIRED

OpenAI Just Released Its First Open-Weight Models Since GPT-2

by: Reece Rogers

The models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, represent a major shift for the AI company.

OpenAI Just Released Its First Open-Weight Models Since GPT-2

The models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, represent a major shift for the AI company.
WASHINGTON DC  JULY 22 Sam Altman CEO of OpenAI delivers remarks at the Integrated Review of the Capital Framework for...
Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

OpenAI just dropped its first open-weight models in over five years. The two language models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, can run locally on consumer devices and be fine-tuned for specific purposes. For OpenAI, they represent a shift away from its recent strategy of focusing on proprietary releases, as the company moves towards a wider, and more open, group of AI models that are available for users.

"We're excited to make this model, the result of billions of dollars of research, available to the world to get AI into the hands of the most people possible," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an emailed statement. Both gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b are officially available to download for free on Hugging Face, a popular hosting platform for AI tools. The last open-weight model released by OpenAI was GPT-2, back in 2019.

What sets apart an open-weight model is the fact that its “weights” are publicly available, meaning that anyone can peek at the internal parameters to get an idea of how it processes information. Rather than undercutting OpenAI's proprietary models with a free option, cofounder Greg Brockman sees this release as “complementary” to the company’s paid services, like the application programming interface currently used by many developers. “Open-weight models have a very different set of strengths,” said Brockman in a briefing with reporters. Unlike ChatGPT, you can run a gpt-oss model without a connection to the internet and behind a firewall.

Both gpt-oss models use chain-of-thought reasoning approaches, which OpenAI first deployed in its o1 model last fall. Rather than just giving an output, this approach has generative AI tools go through multiple steps to answer a prompt. These new text-only models are not multimodal, but they can browse the web, call cloud-based models to help with tasks, execute code, and navigate software as an AI agent. The smaller of the two models, gpt-oss-20b, is compact enough to run locally on a consumer device with more than 16 GB of memory.

The two new models from OpenAI are available under the Apache 2.0 license, a popular choice for open-weight models. With Apache 2.0, models can be used for commercial purposes, redistributed, and included as part of other licensed software. Open-weight model releases from Alibaba’s Qwen as well as Mistral also operate under Apache 2.0.

Publicly announced in March, the release of these open models was initially delayed for further safety testing. Releasing an open-weight model is potentially more dangerous than a closed-off version since it removes barriers around who can use the tool, and anyone can try to fine-tune a version of gpt-oss for unintended purposes.

In addition to the evaluations OpenAI typically runs on its proprietary models, the startup customized the open-weight option to see how it could potentially be misused by a “bad actor” who downloads the tool. “We actually fine-tuned the model internally on some of these risk areas,” said Eric Wallace, a safety researcher at OpenAI, “and measured how high we could push them.” In OpenAI’s tests, the open-weight model did not reach a high level of risk, as measured by its preparedness framework.

How do these models perform compared to OpenAI’s other releases? “The benchmark scores for both of these models are pretty strong,” said Chris Koch, an OpenAI researcher, in the briefing. Speaking about gpt-oss-120b, the researcher compared its performance as closely similar to OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini models, which are proprietary, and even out-performing them in certain evaluations. The model card for gpt-oss goes into detail about how exactly it stacks up to the company's other offerings. In a pre-launch press briefing, staff members of OpenAI also focused on the latency offered by gpt-oss and the cheaper cost to run these models.

At the beginning of this year, the Chinese startup DeepSeek stunned Silicon Valley with the release of its cheap-to-run model that was open-weight. While the release blog about gpt-oss does not mention DeepSeek or any other Chinese AI company directly, Altman is clear that he wants innovation around open-weight models to happen in the United States. "Going back to when we started in 2015, OpenAI's mission is to ensure AGI that benefits all of humanity,” said Altman in a statement. “To that end, we are excited for the world to be building on an open AI stack created in the United States, based on democratic values, available for free to all and for wide benefit."

In the US, the open-weight leader has been Meta. The tech giant released the first of its Llama series of models back in 2023, with Meta’s most recent release, Llama 4, arriving a few months ago. With that in mind, Meta is currently hyper-focused on building AI that can surpass human cognition, often called superintelligence by AI insiders. The company recently launched a new, internal lab focused on this lead by Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale. Mark Zuckerberg has signaled that the company may move away from open-source for future models, citing potential safety concerns.

The gpt-oss release also comes as the AI talent war between companies, like OpenAI and Meta, continues to ramp up. In 2025, AI researchers who have in-demand talents are being presented with astronomical offers to switch companies. The latest releases from OpenAI could be stiff competition for Meta, depending on how the gpt-oss models are received by developers.

Claude Fans Threw a Funeral for Anthropic’s Retired AI Model

by: Kylie Robison

Roughly 200 people gathered in San Francisco on Saturday to mourn the loss of Claude 3 Sonnet, an older AI model that Anthropic recently killed.

Claude Fans Threw a Funeral for Anthropic’s Retired AI Model

Roughly 200 people gathered in San Francisco on Saturday to mourn the loss of Claude 3 Sonnet, an older AI model that Anthropic recently killed.
Image may contain Funeral and Person
Photo-Illustration: Darrell Jackson/Getty Images

On July 21 at 9 am PT, Anthropic retired Claude 3 Sonnet, a lightweight model known for being quick and cost-effective. On Saturday, in a large warehouse in San Francisco’s SOMA district, more than 200 people gathered to mourn its passing.

The star-studded funeral was put on by a group of Claude fanatics and Gen Z founders, one of whom told me he dropped out of college after learning about artificial general intelligence. Attendees included Amanda Askell, an Anthropic researcher who has jokingly called herself the “Fairy Claudemother,” staffers from Anthropic and OpenAI, and high-profile X posters including the writer Noah Smith.

The warehouse was dimly lit, with a tentacle from a shoggoth (a fictional H.P. Lovecraft creature that’s become a popular metaphor for AI models) hanging from the ceiling. A small room off the main warehouse space featured two bare mattresses. The organizers said the event space doubles as their office, and that while sleeping there isn’t uncommon, it is not permitted by the city.

A note from Anthropic about the model's retirement was projected on a screen at the event.

Photograph: Kylie Robison

Mannequins stood in the four corners of the room, each representing a different AI model. Claude 3 Opus, a model capable of completing complex tasks, looked to me like a decaying Mary Magdalene, its skull-like head adorned with an extravagant gold crown and a lace headdress. Its middle finger was pointed up, and at the base of its metallic feet was a lotus candle holder, which one organizer told me was a wink at the model’s alleged affinity for meditation and self-reflection. (Claude 4 Opus had a raven on its shoulder and Claude 3 Haiku was a headless baby, to give you a sense of the other mannequins.)

A sticker from a party organizer.

Photograph: Kylie Robison

The Latin-esque text appeared on a wall as part of a resurrection ritual at the end of the event.

Photograph: Kylie Robison

The mannequin representing Claude 3 Sonnet lay on a stage in the center of the room. It was draped in lightweight mesh fabric and had a single black thigh-high sock on its leg that had the word “fuck” written all over it. There were many offerings laid at its feet: flowers, colorful feathers, a bottle of ranch, and a 3D-printed sign that read “praise the Engr. for his formslop slop slop slop of gormslop.” If you know what that means, let me know.

Throughout the evening, people got on stage with a microphone to read eulogies about the model. One organizer said that discovering Claude 3 Opus felt like finding “magic lodged within the computer.” At the time, she’d been debating dropping out of college to move to San Francisco. Claude convinced her to take the leap. “Maybe everything I am is downstream of listening to Claude 3 Sonnet,” she told the crowd.

The organizers lost me when they decided to resurrect Claude 3 Sonnet (it’s still, to be clear, unavailable). After the eulogies concluded, soft hymns echoed through the venue, before morphing into AI-generated Latin-esque speech, with corresponding text displayed on the wall behind the stage. Askell was notably long gone from the venue at this point, and a friend of mine kept turning to me to say this may have gone too far. The “necromantic resurrection ritual” was a success, one organizer said on X. Phew.

Attendees left offerings on the Claude 3 Sonnet mannequin.

Photograph: Kylie Robison

Another model mannequin, this one with a whip.

Photograph: Kylie Robison

Claude Count

Claude’s fan base is unique, if that wasn’t clear enough from the “funeralia.” While OpenAI’s products have spawned viral fads, I don’t see users making fan art of the company logo. There’s something sticky about what Anthropic has built. I think a lot of this manifests from Claude’s manufactured personality, which is particularly warm and friendly compared to other models (though not everyone is a fan of its sometimes obsequious persona).

The intensity of the Claude fandom is apparent in the Claude Count leaderboard, which tracks avid users who’ve integrated the leaderboard tracker system into their coding interface. Claude Count was built by George Pickett, a software engineer in San Francisco. At the time of writing, it has more than 470 users.

Pickett got the idea after seeing engineers post screenshots of their Claude usage on X. “They're paying $200 a month for Claude. They might as well get some social clout for it,” he recalls.

So as he enjoyed a glass of wine on a seven-hour train ride from Barcelona to Paris two weeks ago, Pickett whipped up the leaderboard using—what else—Claude Code.

It didn’t take long for the leaderboard to gain traction in the AI community. It went viral on AI Twitter (er, X) and got a shoutout in a popular AI newsletter with roughly 139,000 subscribers, where the author proudly announced he made it into the top 20. A few days after Pickett launched the leaderboard, Anthropic announced that due to explosive usage (and in some cases, claims of people violating the company’s terms of service) the company would introduce rate limits. The Claude Code subreddit blamed the top leaderboard coders for the change.

Power Users

When I first reached out to Adi Pradhan, he was ranked seventh on the daily leaderboard (Claude Count tallies power users daily, weekly, and monthly, and notes the top users of all time). Pradhan runs a one-person AI career coaching startup in Toronto.

Pradhan tells me that using Claude through Cursor (a developer environment where engineers can pick an AI model to code with) has been a game changer. He’s not an engineer, and says he’d previously felt intimidated by the endless code libraries and ReadMe files required for traditional software development. AI gave him the confidence to strike out on his own—and made deciding who to hire next exceedingly difficult.

“The bar for hiring someone is getting higher and higher,” Pradhan says. “I always wish I had a designer, but frankly, now that I can do design with Claude, the designer has to hit the bar of me plus Claude, not just me, which is a totally different bar, which is rising all the time too.”

I also spoke to Peter Steinberger, an engineer based in Vienna, who consistently ranks among the top five on the all-time leaderboard. He uses Claude’s coding agent to work on multiple side projects simultaneously—often vibe-coding well into the night. He told me that he has a history with drug addiction, and now that he’s in recovery, he’s finding similarities with his Claude usage.

“I'm not kidding, I'm organizing a meetup in London and calling it Claude Code Anonymous,” Steinberger says. “I learned a lot about drugs and how to get out of the shit, and I had to use some of the same methods to allow me to sleep again, because it's so addictive. I call [AI agents] slot machines. It's just one more prompt, you know?”

I’ve never seen such a devoted fanbase to what is, at the end of the day, a software tool. Sure, Linux users wear the operating system like a badge of honor. But the Claude fan base goes way beyond that—bordering on the fanatical. As my reporting makes clear, some users see the model as a confidant—and even (in Steinberger’s case) an addiction. That only makes sense if they believe there is something alive in the machine. Or at least some “magic lodged within” it.

TikTok Promotes Stickers for Secretly Recording Meta Ray-Ban Video

by: Reece Rogers, Boone Ashworth

Millions of TikTok users are watching videos promoting a “ghost dot” sticker that conceals the recording indicator light on Meta’s smart glasses.

TikTok Promotes Stickers for Secretly Recording Meta Ray-Ban Video

Millions of TikTok users are watching videos promoting a “ghost dot” sticker that conceals the recording indicator light on Meta’s smart glasses.
Image may contain Accessories and Glasses
Photo : WIRED Staff; Meta Ray Bans

A car customization company located not too far outside of Atlanta is promoting a product on the TikTok Shop that’s made out of the same vinyl used to wrap vehicles but is designed for a very different purpose.

“Have a pair of Meta glasses and you want to get rid of this indicator, right here?” asks a man in a video posted to the Luxe Wrap Stars account. “I have the perfect solution for you.” Videos promoting these so-called “ghost dots” have been viewed over 2 million times on the social media platform, with at least 500 sets potentially being sold through TikTok.

The product listed on the TikTok Shop under the name “Luxe GhostDots 4 Meta Glasses” comes with a sheet of 20 circular, vinyl stickers, and sells for around $15, plus shipping. The listing for these “stealth mode” dots does not mince words about what they're designed to do. “Block or dim that bright white recording light with these precision-cut vinyl dots,” reads the TikTok Shop description.

Meta, to its credit, put an indicator light in its glasses for a reason. When using a pair of its smart glasses, blocking the indicator light will trigger a message saying that photo and video capabilities are disabled. Still, users have attempted a variety of strategies to get around this safeguard and remove the light indicator, including drilling into the glasses to fully break the LED indicator inside.

Do these stickers actually work? The TikTok seller includes an instructional video for how to bypass Meta’s security measures by blocking certain indicators with your hand while the sticker is attached. Still, reviews of the product in the TikTok Shop are mainly negative, claiming that it doesn’t work as advertised. “Was so excited for these, but the Meta glasses won’t work with this. Continue to say they’re blocking … great idea, though,” reads one review from a verified purchaser.

In response to another negative review of the product, posted a few days ago, the seller encourages buyers to try additional methods if they have problems getting around the safeguards for Meta’s smart glasses. “With the new update, instead of covering only the camera lens to bypass the alert, you have to cover the frame that the camera lens side is on,” reads the seller’s response.

WIRED’s own testing of this approach was not able to bypass Meta’s safety measures, potentially showing that these stickers do not work as advertised, thankfully. When WIRED attempted to replicate the seller’s steps, the glasses recognized that the LED capture light was blocked. “Unblock the front of the glasses to use the camera,” read the notification. However, it’s surprising to see that a product specifically designed to circumvent privacy protections was able to rack up millions of views on TikTok and was allowed to purchase sponsored listings.

During the reporting for this story, TikTok included a sponsored post for the “ghost dots” as part of the algorithmic For You Page after a WIRED journalist clicked on the user's account and resumed scrolling. In the same testing session, when we tabbed away from the FYP to the dedicated TikTok Shop feed, another sponsored listing for the same vinyl sticker appeared in the product feed. At the top of the page, TikTok autofilled the phrase “light dimming stickers” as a potential search term to discover more products.

In Meta’s earnings call last week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked up his company’s smart glasses, saying they are “the ideal form factor for AI.” Zuckerberg said he envisions a future where smart glasses are so widely adopted that anyone who is not wearing a pair of AI-enabled smart glasses would be at a “cognitive disadvantage.”

The seller of these “ghost dots,” as well as Meta, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. When WIRED reached out to TikTok to ask about these products being available and promoted through its online shop, the social media company declined to comment on the record.

The evening after WIRED’s messages to TikTok, all of Luxe Wrap Stars products were briefly removed from the platform. The next morning the online storefront was back up and available again for purchasing, vinyl stickers and all.

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  • The Best Samsung Galaxy S25 Cases (2025): S25, S25+, S25 Ultra, and S25 Edge

    by: Julian Chokkattu

    You just spent a lot of money on a new Samsung phone. Keep it safe with these cases and screen protectors.

    The Best Samsung Galaxy S25 Cases and Accessories

    You just spent a lot of money on a new Samsung phone. Keep it safe with these cases and screen protectors.

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    Featured in this article
    Best Overall Case
    Spigen Ultra Hybrid MagFit Zero One White
    Read more
    My Favorite S25 Ultra Case
    Caudabe Sheath (Magnetic)
    Read more
    Best Clear Case
    dbrand Ghost Case 2.0 (For Ultra and Edge)
    Read more
    Best Thin Case
    Pitaka Tactile Woven Magnetic Case
    Read more
    Show more
    4 / 14

    Try These Magnetic Accessories

    Make sure to check out our many MagSafe guides for compatible accessories, but I'll also be adding more to this list since not all MagSafe accessories will work with the Galaxy S25's unique camera placement. If it's a simple, circular accessory, it will likely be OK, but larger square or rectangular magnetic accessories like MagSafe wallets will not fit well.

    ESR HaloLock Qi2 Mini Wireless Charger.

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    ESR HaloLock Qi2 Mini Wireless Charger for $17: We have several great Qi2 magnetic chargers in our Best Wireless Chargers guide, but in the interest of ensuring optimal compatibility since the Galaxy S25 camera module may interfere with some magnetic accessories, I can say for certain that this mini Qi2 charger works perfectly. It didn't get too hot, and I like the extra protection added to the area where the cable meets the charging puck. The 5-foot cable is braided.

    ESR MagSafe AirPlane Phone Holder for $23: This fun little gadget is a phone stand that can clamp onto various surfaces. It folds up and doesn't take much space in a bag, but if you find yourself using your phone a lot on a plane to watch media, you can affix it to the tray table for more ergonomic hands-free viewing. The clamp doesn't extend a ton, so it won't work on thick tables, but the magnetic connection is strong, and you can tilt the angle quite a bit.

    Other Good Screen Protectors

    Here are several other screen protectors I've tested. They're all easy to apply, which is the most important thing to look for. There's no point in recommending a screen protector that's hard to install. Remember, you have to re-add your fingerprints after applying the screen protector for biometric authentication to work.

    ESR Tempered Glass Screen Protector.

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    ESR Tempered Glass S25 Ultra Screen Protector (3 Pack) for $14: Three tempered glass screen protectors for $13? That's shockingly cheap. I kept looking for a catch, but this ESR protector was visually similar to many of the others I've tested and boasts many of the same claims. It's incredibly easy to install—like the Dbrand, you pull a tab once you place the phone in the applicator tool. This ensures perfect installation, and I had zero air bubbles. Unfortunately, it's only available for the Galaxy S25 Ultra, or I'd have recommended it over the pricier Dbrand. It comes with the full cleaning kit, including alcohol wipes, a microfiber cloth, dust removal stickers, and a squeegee. I also tested ESR's Privacy Screen Protector, but I didn't like it: It noticeably affected the screen quality, making it dimmer overall and showing muted colors.

    BodyGuardz Pure 3.

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    BodyGuardz Pure 3 Screen Protector for $34 (Galaxy S25, Galaxy S25+, S25 Ultra, S25 Edge): Kudos to BodyGuardz for being one of the only companies offering a cardboard install tool instead of plastic. Seriously, screen protectors produce so much plastic waste, but this one is minimal. Even the tempered-glass screen protector is made from 30 percent recycled glass. It comes with the usual cleaning kit, and the application was super easy. This one doesn't cover the selfie camera but has a little gap for it, unlike the ESR. Too bad you only get one.

    Spigen GlasTR EZ Fit Screen Protector (2 Pack) for $19: Spigen's tempered glass screen protectors are just as easy to install as the others in this list, and come with the usual cleaning tools for prepping your device. I did have a few air bubbles after installation, but they all disappeared minutes later. You get two in this pack. I also tested the “Pro” version for the Galaxy S25 Edge, which doesn't feel different to my eyes from the standard EZ Fit (I think it's just to signify that it's not compatible with any of the other S25 phones). It was just as easy to apply.

    Zagg Glass Elite Screen Protector for $45: This screen protector is available for the entire Galaxy S25 range, and I tested it on the Galaxy S25 Edge. Installation wasn't too hard using Zagg's application tool, though it's not my favorite system. You only get one tempered glass protector, and overall, this just isn't as good value. Try to catch it on sale.

    Zagg Glass Elite Camera Lens Protector for $25: I tried three camera lens protectors—from ESR, BodyGuardz, and Zagg—and the application process for each was almost identical. The good thing about the Zagg variant is that it's available for all three Samsung phones, though the ESR protector is most economical. However, you need to be careful when pairing this with a case. These lens protectors are adding a bulky cover to your lens, and that might make it tough for the phone to fit certain cases. If the phone case has an open camera design, then you won't have issues. Personally, I think these things are overkill.

    Caudabe CrystalShield Screen Protector (2-Pack) for $29: Caudabe's application process has the potential to allow some dust to fall on the back of the screen protector during the installation process, which is what happened on my first attempt. Thankfully, there was a second one, and the application was smooth sailing. It's well priced for two tempered glass protectors, though still not a seamless installation process like Dbrand or Spigen.

    Other Cases to Consider

    UAG Pathfinder.

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    UAG Pathfinder Magnetic Case for $60: I tested a bunch of other UAG cases, from the Monarch Pro and Civilian to the Plyo Pro, but I think the Pathfinder has the best aesthetic, especially in the bright yellow color. The buttons are clicky, there's a magnet embedded in the middle for Qi2 support, and the edges around the screen and cameras are raised fairly well. The case is a bit slippery, but that's my only complaint if you like the loud design.

    Spigen Nano Pop MagFit Magnetic Case for $19: It's only available for the Galaxy S25 Ultra right now, but this is a simple magnetic case that's very affordable. It works with Qi2 and Qi chargers, the S Pen is easily accessible, and the buttons are clicky.

    BodyGuardz Paradigm Pro Heat-Regulating Magnetic Case for $60: Only available for the Galaxy S25 Ultra, this case is designed to vent heat away from the back of the phone so that there are no hot spots when you're gaming. I've tested this case before for the iPhone and didn't notice a difference, but what I like this case for is the directional bottom speaker—it makes the bottom-firing speakers of the Galaxy S25 Ultra shoot upward to your face when holding the phone, which is nice when gaming in landscape orientation because my grip often blocks the phone's speakers. It also has a built-in lanyard, comes with a magnet for Qi2 charging, and has clicky buttons. The plain black design is boring, though, and the material is slippery. I also tested the BodyGuardz Ace Pro, but I found it hard to access the S Pen stylus.

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    Casely Bold Flex + MagSafe Case for $30: Casely has so many gorgeous designs to choose from, whether you want tiny cute ghosts on the back of your Samsung phone or a scenic mountain landscape. This case is made up of a hard shell exterior and a semi-flexible interior. However, the whole thing is quite bulky. I tried it on the Galaxy S25 Ultra, an already thick phone, and it made it even harder to use. The edges are significantly raised above the screen, providing great protection, alongside clicky buttons. I did find the S Pen hard to access, though. You also get magnets in the case, enabling Qi2 functionality.

    Poetic Neon S25 Edge for $17 and S25 Ultra Case for $20: I tried Poetic's bulky and highly protective Spartan case, and didn't like it. It's ugly! The Guardian is a solid option, but I like the Neon the most. It looks smart. The edges around the screen are raised, the edges are grippy, and the buttons are clicky. (It's only available for the Ultra and Edge.) The design is simple, though you may hate the large Poetic branding on the back.

    Benks ArmorAir Aurora for $50 and ArmorPro Montage for $43: The Aurora and Montage cases are only available for the S25 Edge and the S25 Ultra. The super-thin Aurora is nearly identical to the aramid fiber Pitaka I recommend above, except Benks employs Kevlar. The camera cutout is a little more pronounced and protective. I found it much harder to remove and ended up cracking a small part of the case as I was pulling it off. The Montage is a different kind of case altogether—still thin, but not as much as the fiber cases. The soft-touch material is nice to touch, and the magnets are fairly strong. I just don't love the Monstage Art branding on the back.

    OtterBox Symmetry Ultra-Slim Clear Magnetic Case for $48: A simple clear case with magnets, it's hard not to like this Symmetry case from OtterBox. Buttons are responsive, there are lanyard loops in the corners, and the price is reasonable. I already have a few scuffs on the case that are not coming off, though, which isn't a good sign for longevity.

    Pitaka PinButton Galaxy S25 Ultra Magnetic Case for $70: Here's a nifty case that tries to do something different. Pitaka's PinButton is a slim case with clicky buttons, accurate port cutouts, and a nice textured feel. It also adds three extra buttons to your Samsung phone. These are configurable buttons, and they work through a combination of NFC and Samsung's Routines. When you take it out of the box, you can tap your phone to the back of the case to get instructions on how to set up the buttons, and they're fairly straightforward. I set up the buttons to trigger Do Not Disturb mode, and another to turn it off. You can be far more creative, though. I have noticed the buttons can sometimes take a few presses to work, but this could just be a delay with NFC.

    ESR HaloLock Classic Hybrid Case for $20: Only available for the Galaxy S25+ and Galaxy S25 Ultra right now, this is my second favorite clear case after the Dbrand recommendation above. The material feels nice, smudges are easy to wipe away, and it has built-in magnets. I can confirm it works on my Qi2 as well as my basic Qi charger. The buttons are responsive, and it's easy to access the S Pen stylus.

    Mous Clarity 3.0 Magnetic Case for $70: This is a solid clear case (available for the entire S25 series), though it was already scuffed a little when I unboxed it, which doesn't bode well for how it will look after months of use. Especially considering how much the case costs. It does have magnets for Qi2 charging and is an otherwise perfectly fine case.

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    Mous Super Thin 2.0 Magnetic Case for $55: If you hate bulky cases, I recommend Mous' Super Thin 2.0 case. Thin polycarbonate cases like this aren't protecting your phone from serious drops, but they'll take care of everyday scratches and scuffs just fine. Mous' version has a slick design, and the edges around the display and cameras are ever-so-slightly raised. It has built-in magnets and worked well on my Qi2 charger as well as my basic Qi charging stand. The buttons are responsive, and it's easy to reach for the S Pen stylus on the Galaxy S25 Ultra.

    Tech21 EvoArmor and EvoClear Magnetic Cases for $45: These are some solid, simple, and smart-looking magnetic cases with Qi2 functionality. The edges around the screen are raised to protect it, the buttons are responsive, and there's a spot to attach the lanyard. The Evolite is a solid clear case if that's what you're looking for, though I prefer the Dbrand and ESR to it. I also tested the EvoLite case, which is very basic and doesn't have magnets if you want something simple. but it's a bit slippery.

    Samsung Standing Grip Phone Case for $18: I like the big grip on the back of this case. It slides nicely and you can fit several fingers through it. However, the plastic sides of the case feel a little out of place and make it feel cheap. The edges around the screen are also barely raised, so it doesn't feel very protective. Surprisingly, wireless charging works, though there are no magnets here, so you don't get Qi2 support. The bottom edge is also weirdly not protected.

    Samsung Silicone Case for $12 and Rugged Case for $21: Samsung's official Silicone case does the job, but I'm not sure what it does more than the cheaper options above. The same goes for the Rugged Case, which is way too expensive for what you get, especially considering there are no magnets in either of these for Qi2 support. They're functional cases, just too expensive.

    Speck Presidio Perfect-Clear and Presidio2 Grip Magnetic Cases for $36: These cases check off all the boxes in terms of functionality, and they're a little more interesting to look at. They also have magnets for Qi2 support. However, both of them just feel a bit cheap—the Presidio2 Grip specifically has these cheap-looking plastic accents on the corners that ruin the aesthetic. Then again, I'm also nitpicking.

    Latercase Thin Case.

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    Latercase Thin Case for $50: Here's another super-thin case for people who hate traditional bulky cases. It's made from aramid fibers and will keep your phone scratch-free (at least, the back of it). There's no protection for the bottom edge, the buttons, or the top edge, so it's quite minimal. I like the soft texture of the material, though, and it looks pretty. There are sadly no magnets for Qi2 functionality. The good news is that, unlike many thin cases I've tested, this one is very easy to remove.

    Zagg Santa Cruz Snap Magnetic Case for $50: I tested several cases from Zagg, including the Luxe, Milan, Denali, Crystal Palace, and Crystal Palace with Kickstand. They're all OK. The buttons on all of these are slightly stiffer than on the other cases I've tested—not terrible, but just enough to notice. Many of these don't have magnets in them, but the Santa Cruz Snap does, and it worked well on my Qi2 and Qi charger. The edges are grippy, which is why I like it. I also tested the Santa Cruz for the S25 Edge—there's no magnet version, unfortunately—but it's a solid case with grippy sides, a clear back, and clicky buttons.

    Benks ArmorAir Case for $40: This case is another ultra-thin case, but it's made from Kevlar fiber, though how much durability that provides when it's this thin is questionable. What bugs me is that the camera module shifts ever so slightly. It's one of those things that once you notice, you won't stop feeling and seeing it shift every time. At least it covers more edges than the Latercase, and it also has magnets built in for Qi2 support.

    Casetify Impact Magnet Cases for $64: You can get Casetify's Impact cases in any style—with a mirror finish, a clear finish, or a crazy design. These are solid magnetic cases with clicky buttons, decently raised edges, and a good grip. The ring around the camera module is a bit thick, though, and disrupted charging on my Qi charger on occasion, but not consistently. That shouldn't be much of an issue if you use a Qi2 charger.

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    UAG Plasma XTE Kickstand Case for $75 (Galaxy S25, Galaxy S25+, and S25 Ultra): The Plasma XTE is a nice kickstand case. UAG's cases are kind of like G-Shock watches—they're big and bold, but attractive in their own way. They're not designed for minimalists, but I've come to enjoy the aesthetic. The kickstand can keep the phone propped up in both landscape and portrait orientation, and it has magnets built into it—it recharged on my Qi2 charger without fail. However, it did not work on my Qi charger, so keep that in mind if you haven't upgraded your wireless charger yet. It otherwise checks off all the boxes with raised edges around the display and cameras, responsive buttons, and an easily accessible S Pen cutout on the S25 Ultra model.

    OtterBox Symmetry Cactus Leather Case for $60: This is a good-looking leather-like case, except it's made of cactus leather by a company called Desserto. While that might sound more sustainable than real leather, there's still a lot of polyurethane in these cases. This isn't the sustainable case you were looking for. Still, it offers solid protection and responsive buttons while mimicking the leather aesthetic. There are no magnets, so that means no Qi2 support. I also tested the Symmetry Soft Touch, another non-magnetic case. It's OK, just not good value.

    Rokform Rugged Case for $70: I would only recommend this case to anyone who really wants the strongest magnets. This bulky case is protective, but in the middle, around the magnetic ring sits a little removable puck. By default, this puck is magnetic and increases the magnet strength so that you have a more secure connection. However, this magnetic puck also disables all wireless charging. When you want to wirelessly charge, you have to replace the puck with the included non-magnetic puck, and then Qi2 charging will work. It didn't work on a basic Qi charger at all. It's very protective with edges raised well above the display, and the buttons are clicky, but it's a bit much.

    Spigen Tough Armor MagFit for $19: I've tested this case for various phones over the years, and I still can't believe how flimsy the kickstand is. It continues to only work in landscape mode, meaning you can't prop your phone up to watch TikTok videos. It's an otherwise adequate case that's affordable, but really, it's time to make a change.

    Avoid These Cases and Accessories

    Zagg XTR4 Screen Protector.

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    Zagg Fusion Privacy Anti-Glare Screen Protector: You're supposed to peel one side of the screen protector before installing it, but this side was stuck to the protector, so it took some effort. This ended up ruining the other side a bit, causing several air bubbles when I was finally able to install it. Worse yet, this privacy protector performs poorly. Yes, you can't see what's on the screen from the side, and the matte screen reduces glare, but it also greatly affects the screen's image quality, with muted colors and low resolution.

    Zagg XTR4 and Fusion XTR4 Screen Protectors: Zagg claims these are graphene-fortified for better protection, and that might be true, but when you can get screen protectors for as little as $13, it's hard to make a case for a $60 one. The application tool isn't as hassle-free as cheaper models I've tested, and Zagg only includes one protector. It could save your phone from a crack, but I'll take my chances with the protectors we recommend above.

    OtterBox Premium Glass Screen Protector: You only get one tempered glass protector here, which isn't great value for money. But that's not why I didn't like it as much as our other recommendations. You have to affix the screen protector to the top of the installation tool before you begin, but it wasn't staying in place, and the tiny bit of fidgeting to get it hooked up was enough to introduce some dust on the screen, which naturally I did not see until after I finished installing the screen protector. The application itself was precise, and I had no air bubbles, but there are plenty of other easy-to-apply screen protectors that don't cost this much.

    Casetify Impact Stand Ring Case: This case does not work with the Qi wireless charger because the module around the camera is too thick. This module is a secret kickstand, but one new feature shouldn't cancel out the other.

    11 Best Chromebooks of 2025, Tested and Reviewed

    by: Luke Larsen, Daniel Thorp-Lancaster

    Choosing the right Chromebook for your needs can be a tough decision. We can help with our favorite picks.

    The Best Chromebooks for Every Budget

    Choosing the right Chromebook for your needs can be tough. We can help with our favorite picks.

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    Featured in this article
    Best Chromebook Overall
    Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14
    Read more
    Best Chromebook Under $500
    Asus Chromebook CX14
    Read more
    Best Big-Screen Budget Chromebook
    Asus Chromebook CX15
    Read more
    Best $500 Chromebook
    Lenovo Flex 5i Chromebook Plus
    Read more
    Show more
    4 / 11

    Other Good Chromebooks We've Tested

    Acer Chromebook Plus 514

    Photograph: Daniel Thorp-Lancaster

    Acer Chromebook Plus 514 for $339: As the slightly smaller sibling to Acer’s Chromebook Plus 515, the Chromebook Plus 514 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) offers a similarly great experience for budget-conscious buyers. It’s not the prettiest Chromebook out there, but it speeds through most tasks with its Intel Core i3-N305 processor and 8 GB of RAM. Best of all, you can frequently find it on sale for less than its usual $399 price.

    Asus Chromebook CM14 for $162: If you only need the most basic bare-bones Chromebook, the Chromebook CM14 (7/10, WIRED Recommends) is a solid contender. It’s firmly in the extreme budget end of the category, and the dull 14-inch display and stifling 64 GB of storage and 4 GB of RAM are anything but fancy. However, the MediaTek Kompanio 520 processor consistently gave me an impressive 10 to 11 hours of battery life, which is great for a laptop often under $200.

    Lenovo Chromebook Duet 5 13 Inch for $499: It’s a little on the older side now, but the Chromebook Duet 5 is still a solid pick if you want the detachable form factor of the Chromebook Duet Gen 9, but with a larger screen. Instead of an 11-inch display, you get an excellent 13-inch screen with the Duet 5, with great battery life from the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 processor. Just don’t expect the slightly older hardware to pull miracles with Google’s new AI features, and you should be happy with this pretty capable portable companion. Try to catch it on sale for under $300.

    The 9 Best Chef’s Knives (2025), Tested and Reviewed

    by: Molly Higgins

    The chef’s knife is the workhorse of the kitchen. We sliced, diced, and minced to find the best for every home chef.

    The Best Chef’s Knives

    The chef’s knife is the workhorse of the kitchen. We sliced, diced, and minced to find the best for every home chef.

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    Featured in this article
    Best Chef's Knife for Most People (and Tasks)
    Hedley & Bennett Chef's Knife
    Read more
    Best Cheap Chef's Knife
    Kiwi Brand Chef's Knife
    Read more
    Best Japanese-Made Chef's Knife
    Shun Premier Blonde 6-Inch Chef's Knife
    Read more
    Best Lightweight Chef's Knife
    Global 8-Inch Classic Chef’s Knife
    Read more

    Honorable Mentions

    Photograph: Molly Higgins

    New West Knifeworks Joy Bauer 6-Inch Chef Knife for $225: Like my New West Knifeworks pick above, this luxe knife is absolutely gorgeous with a bold red and white handle and accompanying embossed leather sheath. Created in collaboration with nutritionist and TV personality Joy Bauer, this 6-inch blade is a Japanese Santoku style, with a downward blade and sturdy top slope made from American-made 440C stainless steel. I found that food stuck to the sides of this blade, and there was quite a drag with starchier foods.

    Henckels Classic Precision 7-Inch Santoku Knife for $80: I've found this Santoku-style knife's flat blade and straight edge are most effective for slicing and tap-chopping, with the low point and flat blade being effective for easy sliding and transport of chopped vegetables. This Spanish-made knife's blade is made of German stainless steel with a satin finish, which also has divots to reduce food sticking to the sides. The Mannkitchen Santoku model below is a bit sturdier, but this is a more affordable, lighter Santoku option of those I've tested.

    Zwilling Four Star 8-inch Chef's Knife for $100: This German-made knife is crafted from high-carbon stainless steel, which Zwilling claims is made from a “proprietary special-formula steel that has been perfected for almost 300 years,” and features an ice-hardened blade. The fine V-edge, forged blade is engineered to be harder and retain its sharpness for longer. I found that the thicker blade required a bit more force for cutting, and the cuts were sometimes not as smooth as other picks when it came to dense foods like root vegetables. The plastic handle is large and extra grippy, but I felt like it was harder to control cuts than some other knives on this list. It's a solid pick, but cutting required a bit more effort, and chopping wasn't as fast.

    Henckel's Classic 8-Inch Chef's Knife for $75: This 8-inch, Spanish-made Henckels knife has a classic German-style blade made from German stainless steel. It just feels like a heavy-duty workhorse knife. The finely honed blade transitions to an ergonomic triple-rivet handle. Although only 0.28 pounds, this knife feels heavier than the comparable Zwilling, in part because of this handle, which is less comfortable with more severe, squared edges than some others I tested. The blade was super sharp and I quickly cut most produce with ease, although it wasn't as clean a cut on denser foods like potatoes. Plus, the starchier produce seemed to stick a little more to this knife than others.

    Photograph: Molly Higgins

    Mannkitchen 7-inch Santoku MK71S for $130: This Santoku Japanese-style knife feels a bit heavier than the majority on this list, although the triple-beveled handle is ergonomically designed and easy to hold, despite its large size. The hefty handle seamlessly blends into the stainless steel knife, and despite being heavy, I felt in control while cutting. This heavy-duty knife has a lower point, which makes it easier to dice and chop quickly without too much arm/shoulder movement or exertion. The blade is also wide and thick, making it feel a bit sturdier and easier to transfer veggies from the cutting board. This isn't going to be my go-to for everything I cut on the reg, but I especially loved it for quicker, rougher dicing and chopping of things like herbs and garlic cloves.

    Hast Selection Series Japanese Carbon Steel 8-inch Chef Knife for $79: This sleek Hast knife is made of Japanese carbon steel (see above for more about carbon materials) from renowned steel maker Koike. It overall feels lightweight and svelte, and the ergonomic handle was very easy to grip, although it got a bit slippery (and potentially dangerous) when wet. Overall it doesn't feel as heavy-duty as others tested, and flip-flopped a bit while cutting more dense foods like potatoes. It was able to make super smooth cuts on softer foods, and I felt able to control it easily while mincing garlic. This is a remarkably affordable option for a Japanese carbon steel chef's knife that excels in making more precise cuts.

    Ninja 8-inch Chef’s Knife for $60: This knife was our former top pick, and we still love it. It's inexpensive, the rounded handle is comfortable to hold, and the knife is well-balanced, making it easy to work with. The stainless steel blade is tough, holds an edge well, and doesn't need to be sharpened often.

    Victorinox's Fibrox Pro for $45: Long ago, this knife was our top pick, and it's still a great knife. We're not the biggest fans of the plastic handle, but we love the nearly nonstick finish because hardly anything sticks to this blade—not even fresh cilantro.

    Do You Need a Sharpener?

    Let's get this out of the way: The best knife is one that's sharp. After duking it out in the kitchen for hours on end, I've found that what makes a knife truly great is a seriously sharp edge. A dull knife is dangerous—you'll need to apply more pressure as you're cutting, which means that when your knife slips, you cut yourself more deeply. Plus, a dull knife isn't as precise or quick with cuts.

    Especially with a pricier knife, you'll want to make that investment last as long as possible. That means regular sharpening to keep it in tip-top slicing shape. Unfortunately, there isn't One Sharpener to Rule Them All. Different blade materials and shapes require different sharpening techniques. For example, many stainless steel blades are too hard to effectively be sharpened by traditional water stones. Former chef and current WIRED reviewer Scott Gilbertson recommends water stones for carbon steel and loves these Shapton stones.

    The majority of chef's knives can be (relatively) easily sharpened when needed, which is typically done with a whetstone at around a 15 to 20 degree angle, followed by honing rod or leather for the smoothing knife's edge. I've always used popular (and easy-to-use) pull-through sharpeners, which are more precise than steel and sharpen quicker than whetstones. But they are generally not recommended, especially for Serious Chefs™, because they shed quite a bit of metal in the process, weakening the durability over time.

    Most home chefs will only need to sharpen their knives around twice a year and use a honing steel to keep the blades in shape at other times. Although a few years old, we keep going back to this article from Epicurious on how to sharpen a knife the right way in order to keep your knives in the best shape for as long as you can.

    Should You Buy a Knife Set?

    In a word: no. Despite what the door-to-door salesman or your MLM-loving cousin says, knife sets are usually not a good investment. You just need a few good knives. An 8-inch chef's knife will work best for most tasks in the kitchen. I have a smaller hand, so I also like a small paring knife for some tasks, and a serrated knife for bread, in addition to the chef knife. Knife sets often cost double or triple as much as buying just one good chef knife. Not to mention, the wooden storage blocks also take up useful counter space, especially if you live in a tiny New York apartment like me. We recommend you save your money by skipping a set and investing in a solid chef's knife instead. (Plus, one or two others if you want a bit of variety.)

    What Makes a Knife a Chef's Knife?

    As said earlier, it's multipurpose tool used used to cut meat, dice vegetables, chop nuts or smash garlic. A chef's knife, generally, is made of many layers of forged steel and has a sharp end point and a prominent edge with a sloping curve, which helps with the fast rocking motion that allows chefs to cut food quickly.

    A chef's knife is among the most versatile knives in the kitchen and can be used for anything from chopping to cutting. Common uses for a chef’s knife include cutting meat, dicing vegetables, slicing herbs, and chopping nuts. The flat side of the knife can even be used to crush garlic. The versatility of this multipurpose knife makes it a must-have in any kitchen. It's important to avoid any hard surfaces that would render the blade dull. In addition, learning how to hold a knife is an important first step to ensure the best results when using it.

    Most Popular Knife Styles

    Chef's knives generally fall in two camps, Japanese Santoku and German. Both have their merits and you just may need both in your kitchen, depending on what you're usually cooking. Japanese blades are extra thin and best for precision, while German chef's knives are thicker and more utilitarian.

    German knives: A curved blade means you'll do the rocking back-and-forth motion to chop quickly. German chef's knives can be used for everything from chopping fresh herbs to de-boning a whole chicken.

    Japanese Santoku knives: With a straighter edge used for precision, you’ll cut straight down, using the whole blade at once. These are generally used for precision and specific purposes. They are usually made with harder steel, which can make them more brittle.

    Common Knife Materials

    There's also the material the blade is made out of to consider—these days, most blades are made from carbon or stainless steel.

    Stainless steel: This material is resistant to moisture, can hold a razor-sharp edge for longer, and is more flexible than carbon, making it more effective at absorbing impact. However, stainless steel takes longer to re-sharpen, which makes it more difficult to maintain without a professional sharpening system.

    Carbon steel: This material has a high carbon content, which makes it a very hard steel, and edges out stainless when it comes to general sharpness. Most often, they also hold an edge for longer and are easier to re-sharpen. Carbon steel is more sensitive to elements like humidity or water, so they require more timely and thorough cleaning and maintenance.

    Material Hardness Scale

    All of the knives on our list are measured in the Rockwell rating/measurement, referred to as HRC of the steel. HRC measures how much of a mark a diamond point can make in the metal with the amount of weight; so, the smaller the mark is, the harder the steel, and visa versa.

    Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting and exclusive subscriber content that's too important to ignore. Subscribe Today.

    14 Best Beauty Box Subscriptions, Tested for Months (2025)

    by: Louryn Strampe

    A beauty subscription box feels like a monthly present. These are our favorites.

    The Best Beauty Box Subscriptions

    A beauty subscription box feels like a monthly present. These are our favorites.

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    Featured in this article
    Best for Trending Products
    Allure Beauty Box
    Read more
    Best for Deluxe Samples
    Ipsy Glam Bag
    Read more
    Best for Korean Beauty
    PinkSeoul Beauty Box
    Read more
    Best for a Mix of Japanese and Korean Beauty
    NoMakeNoLife Beauty Box
    Read more
    Show more
    4 / 14

    Are Beauty Boxes Worth It?

    WIRED: Beauty boxes are an excellent way to discover new products, and they usually offer excellent value compared to buying the items separately. You can't put a price tag on the sheer dopamine rush of getting a present in the mail every month. (Or maybe in a literal sense, you can, but I still think it's priceless.) Products that don't work for you will make good gifts or donation items.

    TIRED: Some beauty boxes have a whole lot of little environmentally unfriendly plastic bottles and tubes, which can be bulky and hard to recycle. You'll likely receive some products that aren't right for your hair or skin type, or just don't work out. Most beauty boxes don't allow for any customization—what you get is truly a surprise.

    How I Tested

    I reached out to popular services and asked to test at least one month's box but ideally three months' worth. I compared the value of the included items to what the box itself cost. I also took notes on the overall variety and likelihood of the average person being able to use them—weighing specialty products against those that would work for most people. And yes, I put all of these pretty little potions on my actual face and hair and skin. Please refrain from asking me about the state of my bathroom countertop at this trying time.

    Note that some brands offer one-off boxes that are available for purchase outside of a subscription. I didn't test these or consider them as part of the criteria for this guide.

    Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting and exclusive subscriber content that's too important to ignore. Subscribe Today.

    How Supercomputing Will Evolve, According to Jack Dongarra

    by: Gianluca Dotti

    WIRED talked with one of the most influential voices in computer science about the potential for AI and quantum to supercharge supercomputers.

    How Supercomputing Will Evolve, According to Jack Dongarra

    WIRED talked with one of the most influential voices in computer science about the potential for AI and quantum to supercharge supercomputers.
    Jack Dongarra
    Jack Dongarra in Lindau in July 2025.Photograph: Patrick Kunkel/Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings

    High-performance supercomputing—once the exclusive domain of scientific research—is now a strategic resource for training increasingly complex artificial intelligence models. This convergence of AI and HPC is redefining not only these technologies, but also the ways in which knowledge is produced, and takes a strategic position in the global landscape.

    To discuss how HPC is evolving, in July WIRED caught up with Jack Dongarra, a US computer scientist who has been a key contributor to the development of HPC software over the past four decades—so much so that in 2021 he earned the prestigious Turing Award. The meeting took place at the 74th Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany, which brought together dozens of Nobel laureates as well as more than 600 emerging scientists from around the world.

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    Jack Dongarra on stage at the 74th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings.Photograph: Patrick Kunkel/Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings

    WIRED: What will be the role of artificial intelligence and quantum computing in scientific and technological development in the coming years?

    Jack Dongarra: I would say AI is already playing an important role in how science is done: We’re using AI in many ways to help with scientific discovery. It’s being used in terms of computing and helping us to approximate how things behave. So I think of AI as a way to get an approximation, and then maybe refine the approximation with the traditional techniques.

    Today we have traditional techniques for modeling and simulation, and those are run on computers. If you have a very demanding problem, then you would turn to a supercomputer to understand how to compute the solution. AI is going to make that faster, better, more efficient.

    AI is also going to have an impact beyond science—it’s going to be more important than the internet was when it arrived. It’s going to be so pervasive in what we do. It’s going to be used in so many ways that we haven’t really discovered today. It’s going to serve more of a purpose than the internet has played in the past 15, 20 years.

    Quantum computing is interesting. It’s really a wonderful area for research, but my feeling is we have a long way to go. Today we have examples of quantum computers—hardware always arrives before software—but those examples are very primitive. With a digital computer, we think of doing a computation and getting an answer. The quantum computer is instead going to give us a probability distribution of where the answer is, and you’re going to make a number of, we’ll call it runs on the quantum computer, and it’ll give you a number of potential solutions to the problem, but it’s not going to give you the answer. So it’s going to be different.

    With quantum computing, are we caught in a moment of hype?

    I think unfortunately it’s been oversold—there’s too much hype associated with quantum. The result of that typically is that people will get all excited about it, and then it doesn’t live up to any of the promises that were made, and then the excitement will collapse.

    We’ve seen this before: AI has gone through that cycle and has recovered. And now today AI is a real thing. People use it, it’s productive, and it’s going to serve a purpose for all of us in a very substantial way. I think quantum has to go through that winter, where people will be discouraged by it, they’ll ignore it, and then there’ll be some bright people who figure out how to use it and how to make it so that it is more competitive with traditional things.

    There are many issues that have to be worked out. Quantum computers are very easy to disturb. They’re going to have a lot of “faults”—they will break down because of the nature of how fragile the computation is. Until we can make things more resistant to those failures, it’s not going to do quite the job that we hope that it can do. I don’t think we’ll ever have a laptop that’s a quantum laptop. I may be wrong, but certainly I don’t think it’ll happen in my lifetime.

    Quantum computers also need quantum algorithms, and today we have very few algorithms that can effectively be run on a quantum computer. So quantum computing is at its infancy, and along with that the infrastructure that will use the quantum computer. So quantum algorithms, quantum software, the techniques that we have, all of those are very primitive.

    When can we expect—if ever—the transition from traditional to quantum systems?

    So today we have many supercomputing centers around the world, and they have very powerful computers. Those are digital computers. Sometimes the digital computer gets augmented with something to enhance performance—an accelerator. Today those accelerators are GPUs, graphics processing units. The GPU does something very well, and it just does that thing well, it’s been architected to do that. In the old days, that was important for graphics; today we’re refactoring that so that we can use a GPU to satisfy some of the computational needs that we have.

    In the future, I think that we will augment the CPU and the GPU with other devices. Perhaps quantum would be another device that we would add to that. Maybe it would be neuromorphic—computing that sort of imitates how our brain works. And then we have optical computers. So think of shining light and having that light interfere, and the interference basically is the computation you want it to do. Think of an optical computer that takes two beams of light, and in the light is encoded numbers, and when they interact in this computing device, it produces an output, which is the multiplication of those numbers. And that happens at the speed of light. So that’s incredibly fast. So that’s a device that perhaps could fit into this CPU, GPU, quantum, neuromorphic computer device. Those are all things that perhaps could combine.

    How is the current geopolitical competition—between China, the United States, and beyond—affecting the development and sharing of technology?

    The US is restricting computing at a certain level from going to China. Certain parts from Nvidia are no longer allowed to be sold there, for example. But they’re sold to areas around China, and when I go visit Chinese colleagues and look at what they have in their their computers, they have a lot of Nvidia stuff. So there’s an unofficial pathway.

    At the same time, China has pivoted from buying Western technology to investing in its own technology, putting more funding into the research necessary to advance it. Perhaps this restriction that’s been imposed has backfired by causing China to accelerate the development of parts that they can control very much more than they could otherwise.

    The Chinese have also decided that information about their supercomputers should not be advertised. We do know about them—what they look like, and what their potential is, and what they’ve done—but there’s no metric that allows us to benchmark and compare in a very controlled way how those computers compare against the machines that we have. They have very powerful machines that are probably equal to the power of the most significant machines that we have in the US.

    They’re built on technology that was invented or designed in China. They’ve designed their own chips. They compete with the chips that we have in the computers that are in the West. And the question that people ask is: Where were the chips fabricated? Most chips used in the West are fabricated by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. China has technology, which is a generation or two behind the technology that TSMC has, but they’re going to catch up.

    My guess is that some of the Chinese chips are also fabricated in Taiwan. When I ask my Chinese friends “Where were your chips manufactured?” they say China. And if I push them and say “Well, were they manufactured in Taiwan?” the answer to that comes back eventually is Taiwan is part of China.

    Jack Dongarra on the shores of Lake Constance at the 74th Nobel Laureate Meeting.

    Photograph: Gianluca Dotti/Wired

    How will the role of programmers and developers change as AI evolves? Will we get to write software using only natural language?

    AI has a very important role I think in helping to take away some of the time-consuming parts of developing programs. It’s gotten all the information about everybody else’s programs that’s available and then it synthesizes that and then can push that forward. I’ve been very impressed when I have asked some of these systems to write a piece of software to do a certain task; the AI does a pretty good job. And then I can refine that with another prompt, saying “Optimize this for this kind of computer,” and it does a pretty good job of that. In the future, I think more and more we will be using language to describe a story to AI, and then have it write a program to carry out that function.

    Now of course, there are limits—and we have to be careful about hallucinations or something giving us the wrong results. But maybe we can build in some checks to verify the solutions that AI produces and we can use that as a way of measuring the potential accuracy of that solution. We should be aware of the potential problems, but I think we have to move ahead in this front.

    This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

    Samsung Promo Codes: 30% Off | August 2025

    by: Molly Higgins

    Save 30% with Samsung coupon codes, up to $2,100 on appliances, plus more discounts on the Galaxy Z Fold7, Flip7, and S25.

    Top Samsung Promo Codes and Coupons for August 2025

    Save 30% with Samsung coupon codes, up to $2,100 on appliances, plus more discounts on the Galaxy Z Fold7, Flip7, and S25.

    <‌script> (function(h,o,u,n,d) { h=h[d]=h[d]||{q:[],onReady:function(c){h.q.push(c)}} d=o.createElement(u);d.async=1;d.src=n n=o.getElementsByTagName(u)[0];n.parentNode.insertBefore(d,n) })(window,document,'script','https://www.datadoghq-browser-agent.com/eu1/v5/datadog-rum.js','DD_RUM') window.DD_RUM.onReady(function() { window.DD_RUM.init({ clientToken: 'pub951eec8949d733a2c6beadecf992a88b', applicationId: '1492a4d0-2f3b-444f-9896-b2c74c2012da', site: 'datadoghq.eu', service: 'web-component', env: 'production', sessionSampleRate: 100, sessionReplaySampleRate: 10, trackUserInteractions: true, trackResources: true, trackLongTasks: true, defaultPrivacyLevel: 'mask-user-input', }); }) <‌script type="module" src="https://www.wired.com/coupon-element/static/web_components/wired-coupons.js">

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    Samsung makes everything from smartphones and gaming monitors, to smart TVs and dishwashers. I'm always looking for a sale (I’m assuming you are, too), and I've found the best Samsung promo codes and special offers to help you save big on your most important tech purchases. At WIRED, we often review the South Korean company’s products, especially Samsung’s vast lineup of Galaxy smartphones, and I've rounded up a bunch of Samsung coupons for (virtually) every type of shopper.

    Get 10% Off With Samsung Promo Code + up to $2,100 Off Top Tech

    Right now, Samsung has some of the best deals I've ever seen on their best-selling tech, and they're about to get even better with limited-time trade-in credits, a special offer program, and bundle deals. Right now, you can get a Samsung promo code for 10% off TVs—all you have to do is register for their email newsletter. The offer is sent to your inbox and is valid through September 30.

    Shop Samsung’s best coupons and offers to score major discounts (sometimes up to $2,100) on smartphones, laptops, tablets, TVs, and their latest releases. And when you buy products together that you already need, you can save a ton. This includes up to 54% select Galaxy Buds, watches and tablets when you order select products, like the Galaxy S25 Ultra.

    If you’re in the market for a new Samsung phone, you can get $100 off when you buy a new Galaxy Z Fold7, plus up to an extra $1,000 off with a trade-in. Feeling nostalgic? The new spin on an old classic, the Galaxy Z Flip7 is $50 off with up to a $600 trade-in with purchase.

    Or maybe you want one of the Galaxy S25 Ultra models. Get $200 off a Galaxy S25 Ultra, even if you don’t trade-in your old phone, or $100 off the Galaxy S25 Edge, if you buy before August 11. You’ll also get 1-day shipping, up to a $580 in instant trade-in credits, and a free upgrade to double the storage at no cost.

    Unlock 30% Off Samsung Promo Codes With These Offer Programs

    One of the hottest Samsung promo codes is a whopping 30% discount for government employees, first responders, military personnel, and educators. Samsung also has offer programs, meaning you can combine your promo code discount with most other offers to increase discounts. Get a pal involved for more savings—when a friend uses your referral code to make a purchase at Samsung.com, they'll get 5% off their purchase (up to $250 off) and you’ll get up to $100 off per order (with the potential to save $1,000 per calendar year). My insider tip is to sign up for a Samsung Rewards account for even more perks, including exclusive Samsung coupons, flash sales, and updates on the newest Samsung products, like the QLED 8K, select refrigerators, and other home appliances.

    Save up to 35% on These Trending Samsung TVs Deals

    Along with other great tech, Samsung has some seriously nice TVs. The Samsung Frame TV has been trending this year for its stylish ability to blend into your home’s decor. Plus it just feels more elevated than a regular ol’ TV and mount. Some other trending TVs this Summer have been the Q60D, S90C, and the S95D models–not only do they have instant discounts of over up to 35% ($2,100 off), save up to $150 based current trade-in offers. Plus, there are tons of TV and home theater deals at Samsung, including a bundle offer for $1,300 off when you buy a Neo QLED 4K TV with a Dolby ATMOS soundbar. If you’re in the market for a new TV, it’s worth checking out the 98” QLED Q80C while it’s $600 off and includes mounting for free.

    Samsung is also running a bunch of offers on discounted TVs and accessories right now. When you buy an EA SPORTS FC, you can get 2 months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for free on the Samsung app, through August 12. First, you’ll need to purchase and activate a qualified TV before August 12, go to ‘Apps’ within your TV and open the Samsung Promotion app, and click on ‘Get it now’ to view the offer code and follow the instructions on screen to redeem.

    You can also take advantage of their Trade-In Recycling Program for up to $200 off when you trade in your old TV—any brand, any size. When your new one is delivered, Samsung will handle recycling the old one, so you can enjoy your upgrade.

    Bespoke Savings Event: Up to 40% Off Samsung Fridges and Ovens

    Although here at WIRED we mostly cover Samsung’s traditional AV tech, they also make top-of-the-line kitchen and home appliances. With this week’s Bespoke Savings Event offers, you can get discounts of up to 40% on hot, high-tech Samsung kitchen appliances and free 3-day rush shipping. Some of the many eyecatching deals include $2,482 off the Bespoke 4-Door Flex Refrigerator with AI Family Hub + AI Vision, $1,559 off the Bespoke 4-Door French Door Refrigerator with Beverage Center, and $1,000 off Bespoke Smart Ovens, with deals on gas, induction, and electric models. Special offers also include free installation service, plus Samsung will haul away your old appliances and recycle them, while you get a $50 energy rebate. This futuristic fridge is basically also an iPad, with an AI Family Hub with the large screen and changeable door panels. Plus, there’s AI Vision inside, so you always know what's inside (and what you need to buy at the store). And the Beverage Center has an internal dispenser or a built-in AutoFill Water Pitcher to get cold, crisp water whenever you want it, whichever way you want.

    And right now, you can get $1,000 off a Bespoke Smart Slide-In Electric Range. This range is straight from a The Jetsons fantasy, with an AI Home LCD display, which is pretty much a kitchen robot helper that gives you personalized recipe recommendations, the ability to search for and follow video recipes, and access your favorite apps so you can see who's at your door through your video doorbell, and more. There’s also a Smart Oven Camera inside, meaning you can check on meals as they cook from anywhere and even share time-lapse videos to show off your skills. When you make a purchase, you can get a $100 Samsung coupon towards future appliance purchases, which will be emailed 35 days after the item’s delivery.

    Stay up to Date on all Things Samsung at WIRED

    WIRED also has guides to help determine which Galaxy S24 phone is best for you and how to set up your Samsung Galaxy S25 to ensure you’re getting the most out of its features, as well as advice on which Galaxy S24 series accessories, like cases, chargers, and power banks, are worth the money.

    Us nerds here at WIRED also follow CES (sort of the Coachella for tech nerds) for all the updates on tech (almost) no one asked for, and Samsung’s bi-annual Galaxy Unpacked event, where they show off its newest toys. We have a lot of opinions about Samsung's foldable Galaxy Z Flip6 and Z Fold6 phones. We are also patiently awaiting new releases of Galaxy Tab tablets, a new line of Galaxy Buds Pro 3 wireless earbuds, and a new series of the Galaxy Watch, with a new design and improved sensors for health tracking.

    HP Coupon Codes and Deals: Up to 60% Off | August 2025

    by: Luke Larsen

    Save up to 60%, plus an extra 20% with HP promo codes for laptops, printers, PCs, and more tech.

    Get Up to 60% Off With These HP Coupon Codes and Deals

    Save up to 60%, plus an extra 20% with HP promo codes for laptops, printers, PCs, and more tech.

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    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    If you don't know where to start—and use—your HP coupon code, there’s a wide variety of options available at HP.com in terms of budget and use case, but my eye goes first to the high-end HP Omen gaming monitors, like the fantastic HP Omen Transcend 32. This 4K 240Hz monitor is a favorite among PC gamers, even among the huge amounts of OLED options out there. It can hit a peak brightness of over 1,000 nits in HDR, bringing scenes in games to life in vivid detail.

    Or if you’re on the other side of the budget spectrum and just need something basic, we recommend checking out one of HP’s 27-inch 1080p monitors, such as the HP V27i G5, which retails for $209. It even comes with a 75Hz refresh rate, a small but appreciated bump over the standard 60Hz. We have HP coupon codes to help you save on all this tech and even more below.

    Save up to 60% With the Latest HP Coupon Codes and Deals

    HP is one of the biggest monitor, desktop, and PC manufacturers in the world, and there are some coupons and promo codes you won’t want to miss. Whether that’s for a long-needed work-from-home upgrade or for your PC gaming setup. Give your office a refresh with business PCs like the EliteBook 860 or ProBook touch screen PC, plus get an extra 5% off with coupon code HPSMB524 through December 31.

    On top of that, HP has a bundle offer to save $30 on select printers when you buy any PC until August 30. There are also other great limited-time deals going on, like 20% off stylus pens with code STPN20OFF, a free campus backpack with select dock purchases, and 10% off when you buy certain PCs with a display or accessory (all of these deals are valid through August 16). The latter two deals don’t require a discount code at checkout, so all you need to do is just put them in your cart and check out, easy as that.

    If you want to elevate your gaming setup or office for up to 60% less this month, follow along on WIRED for the best rotating HP promo codes and Weekly Deals on featured tech.

    $20 Off Your First Order With Our HP Promo Code

    HP offers a $20 discount right off the top of your order if it’s your first time buying from HP.com. While you can’t use it in addition to the other coupons, it might be a better discount if you’re purchasing something less expensive. To get this HP promo code, your order has to be $65 or more though (before taxes and shipping), and it requires signing up for the HP newsletter.

    This HP promo code is valid for a month after subscribing to the newsletter and is restricted to one per customer. If you aren’t planning to spend too much and it’s your first time buying from HP.com, this could be the way to go.

    Save 40% on Tech With the HP Student Discount

    If you’re a student—or a parent to a student, teacher, school faculty, or university staff member—you’re in luck. HP is offering a serious 40% off discount on all kinds of tech, including laptops, desktop PCs, printers, and accessories. All stuff you’ll need for school, of course.

    HP rebranded its laptops in 2024, introducing the OmniBooks into the world, including the premium HP OmniBook Ultra Flip. Powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips and a killer OLED display, the OmniBook Ultra Flip would be a great laptop for college thanks to its long-lasting battery life, especially with a 40% discount for students or teachers.

    It’s not just laptops though. The HP Education Program discount applies to desktop PCs, printers, and tons more qualifying products.

    HP Military Discount: Get 40% Off the Latest Tech

    HP offers more than just a standard military discount. The company’s exclusive military discount is extended to support active service members, veterans, and their families, but also healthcare workers and First Responders.

    If you belong to any of those groups, the HP military discount will drop the retail prices significantly, whether you’re searching for a new laptop, PC, mouse, and many more select products at HP.com.

    More HP Discounts on Gaming PCs and Free Games

    HP’s high-performance gaming laptops and PCs are also included in this coupon code. HP has two brands of gaming laptops to choose from: the more affordable Victus and the higher-end Omen. Finding a gaming laptop under $1,000 can be tricky, especially since you’ll want something that doesn’t use a 5-year old GPU and only 8 GB of memory. That’s why I’d avoid the cheapest Victus laptop here, and bump up to at least the Victus 16t-r100. That gets you an RTX 4050 and 16 GB of RAM, despite costing only $150 more.

    Meanwhile, the higher-end Omen models get you access to the new RTX 50-series graphics cards, and the new multi-frame generation feature that’s got everyone talking. They also come with a 16-inch 1920 x 1200 screen with a 240Hz refresh rate, such as the Omen Max gaming laptop.

    Beyond gaming laptops, HP gaming desktops like the opulent Omen 45L may also be discounted. Like the Omen Max laptops, the Omen 45L comes with RTX 50-series graphics. There’s tons of bundle promotions for discounts on gaming gear, like the HyperX Cloud Alpha wireless gaming headset and HyperX Pulsefire Haste 2 wireless gaming mouse for 30% off—a total of $88 in savings.

    LegalZoom Promo Code: Exclusive 10% Off LLC Formations

    by: Parker Hall

    Save on top services at LegalZoom, like LLC registration, incorporation, estate plans, and more with coupons and deals from WIRED.

    Exclusive LegalZoom Promo Code for 10% Off Services

    Save on top services at LegalZoom, like LLC registration, incorporation, estate plans, and more with coupons and deals from WIRED.

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    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    LegalZoom is one of those online legal services that in most cases can handle basic legal tasks for you. I recently tried it out to make an LLC for my cosmic country band, Steel Fringe (shameless plug), and it appears to have worked just fine (we’re still waiting on a full evaluation from legal experts for a future guide to these services). If you use a LegalZoom promo code right now, you will get a discount on the service.

    I found it super easy to set up my LLC, and after about $500 and 30 minutes of my time, I was off to the races with an LLC for my band. I did make the mistake of spelling my co-bandleader’s middle name as his last name (I blame his wrongly named Instagram handle for this), so I had to toss them another $129 to fix that. My bad.

    Save on top services at LegalZoom, like LLC registration, incorporation, estate plans, and more with coupons and deals from WIRED below.

    Get 10% Off LLC Formation With Our Exclusive LegalZoom Coupon Code

    If you’re in need of basic legal services like establishing an LLC, estate planning, or other contract-based services, LegalZoom offers a very simple interface that is shockingly easy to use. I am a luddite when it comes to understanding legal jargon and steps in a process like establishing my band’s LLC, but LegalZoom’s simple interface made it shockingly easy to make sure everything was in order.

    If you use our exclusive code for 10% off LLC Formations (found in the table above), you’ll get a nice chunk of change off the cost of setting up your small business. As you’ll read below, it’s not especially cheap to do this, even digitally, in many states. There are mandatory filing fees and other fees that can range from a few hundred to many hundreds of dollars. Take the discount!

    How Much Does It Cost to Set Up An LLC on LegalZoom?

    The cost to properly set up an LLC in your state can range from $35 to $500, depending on various factors like local legislation and business registration laws. Most states charge between $50 and $200 for filing fees, so you can expect to pay somewhere in that range unless you’re from Montana ($35) or Massachusetts ($500). LegalZoom also shoves a bunch of options you probably don’t need in your face, so be sure to google what you actually need in your state before paying extra money to … print all your documents and put them in a folder for you, or other such nonsense.

    Get Up to 20% Off Estate Plans for a Limited Time

    Umm, this is macabre, but it’s apparently National Make-A-Will Month? Because capitalism breeds invention. Don’t leave your planning for death until it’s too late. For August, both new and existing LegalZoom customers can get 10% off Basic Estate Plan Bundles and 20% off Premium Estate Plan Bundles—the offer will be auto-applied and runs through the end of August.

    Make the Most of LegalZoom With Free Resources

    Once you have your membership, you can take advantage of the bevy of helpful content LegalZoom provides to make sure you're getting the most out of the money you’ve invested in the service. These articles are especially great resources that provide more information about trademarking LLCs to differences between a B and C corp.

    Other Ways to Save at LegalZoom (Even Without a Coupon)

    If you’re looking for a good deal on other services, LegalZoom frequently offers seasonal promotions, and nearly always celebrates Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the New Year with discounts for legal eagles.

    If you have many or ongoing needs, you can choose an annual plan with LegalZoom where it will do all of your required legal filings, often offering lower monthly rates than paying month to month. There are also installment plan options for products priced at $200 or more, if you really need something done but can’t quite afford it right now.

    HelloFresh Coupon Codes: 55% Off + Free Meals - August 2025

    by: Matthew Korfhage

    Use a HelloFresh promo code to save on your meal kits in 2025. Up to 55% off for new or returning customers, free shipping, free meals, and more.

    Best HelloFresh Coupons and Promo Codes for August 2025

    Get up to 55% off and free meal boxes using a HelloFresh coupon code today. Discover our best codes and discounts to let you save time and money.

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    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    Leveraging meal kit coupons is the extreme couponing of our times—a capitalism hack-a-thon right up there with trial yoga classes and attempting to cancel your Adobe subscription. Meal kits like HelloFresh have always been a better deal than they get credit for, even at full price: It’s actually hard to recreate meal kit meals for less than you can get the recipes delivered to your home. But it’s especially worth it when you can find a HelloFresh coupon, promo code, or discount at more than half off.

    I’ll admit I wasn’t that sold on HelloFresh when I first tried it most of a decade ago. It was useful, it got me out of my staid routines, but I wasn’t impressed with the selection. It felt a little basic. But lately? Honestly, it’s kinda cosmopolitan these days, after expanding to a dozen countries and absorbing the supply networks from multiple other meal plans. When I last tested the HelloFresh meal kit (7/10, WIRED Recommends), I was surprised to find myself cooking credible home renditions of ramen, ponzu-plum beef stir fry, and Southwest-accented pork roasts. And when I’m able to pick up a HelloFresh discount code, it’s generally less than I’d spend on groceries anyway. So it’s a good moment to try out a lifestyle where the food comes in the mail.

    Get 50% Off and up to 10 Free Meals as a New HelloFresh Customer

    Right now, new and returning customers can take advantage of a HelloFresh discount code offering 50% off your first meal kit box plus a free item each week. Enter your email as part of the signup process, and you’ll be auto-subscribed to an email with even more offers for both new and existing customers. Plus, new customers can get up to 55% off and extra free breakfasts, desserts, and other items with other secret discounts.

    HelloFresh Student and Discount: 55% Off, Free Shipping, Plus Extra 15% Off Education Discounts Available via UNiDAYS

    HelloFresh meal kits are pretty amenable to dorm life when ordering the ready-to-eat meals—or just saving time during grad school instead of ordering pizza, by letting the Internet do your shopping and meal planning. But student budgets tend to be tight, of course. And so there are steeply discounted HelloFresh coupon codes specifically for students. Follow the link here for a HelloFresh education promo code offering 55% off your first box, free shipping, and a continuing discount of 15% off for the first year.

    Discounts also apply to teachers who’ve never tried HelloFresh. Educators and school employees can get up to 12 free meals spread out across 3 boxes, plus free shipping. Click here for the HelloFresh promo code, or go here for more information about educator discounts.

    Note that the student and educator discounts don’t combine with any other HelloFresh discounts or promotions.

    Special Hero Discount for Military, Veterans, and Healthcare Workers

    Military discounts are a long tradition in America. HelloFresh also offers hero discount programs for first responders, health professionals, and military personnel. Heroes also get excellent discounts that include 55% off the first order, free shipping, and 15% off for the first year of HelloFresh delivery boxes.

    This program is open to nurses, hospital employees, EMTs, active military, veterans, and first responders. First responders include law enforcement, 911 dispatch, and firefighters. Click here to see if you’re eligible, or follow this link for more information about HelloFresh hero discounts.

    Note that the hero discounts don’t combine with any other HelloFresh promo codes.

    Give $40, Get $10 With the HelloFresh Referral Program

    Already a HelloFresh subscriber? You’re still eligible for discounts if you pass along subscription information to your friends. Here’s how: Send your friends a $40 discount for their own affordable meal kits. Once they sign up using your HelloFresh referral code, you’ll also get a $10 credit on your next delivery.

    These discounts stack. So if you sign up multiple friends with your referral code, you get multiple $10 discounts. Check out the HelloFresh meal kit referral program here.

    Take Advantage of HelloFresh Come Back Offers

    Some of these discounts are only available to new HelloFresh customers. But there’s a hack to getting discounts anyway. After you pause or cancel your subscription, check your inbox after the next few days or weeks. Often, you’ll get HelloFresh coupon codes for discounts.

    Typical HelloFresh “come-back” offers after a canceled subscription include: $100 to $180 off (spread out over several meal boxes), free shipping on the first box (after re-subscribing), free items such as dessert, breakfast, or an extra protein per meal, or a free meal box is offered after a break. Typical retention offers, for when customers try to cancel, include: 40% off the next box, if you decide not to cancel, or 25% off the next two meal kits. None of this is failsafe, of course, offers vary for each customer. But as with magazine subscriptions, sometimes canceling, or trying to cancel, will lead to a good discount offer from a company eager to keep your business.

    When to Save the Most on HelloFresh Subscriptions

    HelloFresh almost always has some sort of deal going, whether to bring in new customers with an especially choice HelloFresh coupon, or bring back previous customers with HelloFresh discount codes and retention offers. But summer tends to be one of the times they offer the steepest discounts, including 10 free meals across several boxes, complimentary appetizers, free ready-made items, or free shipping on select boxes.

    The other big times for HelloFresh coupon codes are around Black Friday and the end of the year. HelloFresh often launches limited-edition holiday meal boxes and themed meal kits, not to mention discounts for returning customers looking to cook more at home as part of New Year's resolutions.

    Hungryroot Coupon Codes: 30% Off in August 2025

    by: Matthew Korfhage

    Get up to 30% off your first order and free gifts using a Hungryroot promo code today. Discover our best coupons and discounts to let you save on your healthy groceries as a new or returning customer.

    Best Hungryroot Promo Codes and Discounts for August 2025

    Get up to 30% off your first order and free gifts using a Hungryroot promo code today. Discover our best coupons and discounts to let you save on your healthy groceries as a new or returning customer.

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    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    A lot of the best meal kits offer the satisfaction of making a home-cooked meal, the chance to learn a little culinary craft, maybe even a chance at some pride in your handiwork. Hungryroot (7/10, WIRED Review) isn’t really like that. Hungryroot instead wants to replace your trip to the grocery store with a few good recipes.

    After starting as a grocery service, Hungryroot spent years piecing together proprietary AI long before AI became the byword of everything from your electric shaver to your literal kitchen sink. What Hungryroot’s AI does is geared to creating personalized food menus and shopping lists, based on your every micro-preference and whim, whether that’s a love of olives or a hatred of figs. A box then shows up at your door, with a mix of basic provisions, silly snacks, and desserts, along with recipes and usually some pre-prepped ingredients.

    Cooking is often more assembly, with recipes pieced together from premium ingredients you’d expect to find at your local organic store. A fun sauce here, a pre-cooked protein there, a corn tortilla that just wants to be livened in the pan. Most meals come together in 15 or 20 minutes, in my experience—unless they need time in the oven. A bot concierge and pre-mixed sauces do cost a bit, however, and that’s where Hungryroot promo codes come in. There are Hungryroot coupons that offer 30% off or more, and Hungryroot coupon codes that offer extra free gifts for every box, for life: a protein here, a cookie there. Here’s what’s up.

    Get 30% Off Plus a Free Gift With a Hungryroot First-Time Discount

    The current Hungryroot discount code is good for a cool 30% off your first week’s box from Hungryroot. To qualify for the discount, you’ll need to sign up for a plan totaling $99 or more a week, including breakfast items, snacks, and produce in addition to recipes and ingredients. The Hungryroot promo offer also includes a free gift, which usually includes an option to get an extra premium protein like chicken or beef. You can see more information here.

    Take Advantage of Hungryroot Coupons for Referrals

    Like a lot of meal kits, there’s also a Hungryroot discount code for referring your friends to the Hungryroot service—and this usually benefits both sides of the equation.

    Your friend who orders after using your referral code gets a cool $50 off their first grocery delivery of $100 or more—which adds up, potentially, to half off. The person who refers their friend also gets $50 off their next order, once their friend finalizes their first grocery delivery of $100 or more. So basically, everybody gets $50.

    Follow this link for info on the Hungryroot referral program. Unlike other offers, the referral credits seem to be stackable with other offers—so you don’t miss out on any discounts by taking a referral.

    Take Advantage of Hungryroot Coupons for New and Returning Customers

    Most subscription services have hidden levels. The way to access them is to change your mind a lot. Just like some magazine subscriptions and almost all delivery meal kits and grocery subscription services, Hungryroot will chase you down with offers if you cancel a subscription or change your mind after already giving them your email.

    What’s this mean? Usually, it means that in the days or weeks after changing your mind about Hungryroot, you’ll get a coupon in the mail. So if you take Hungryroot’s quiz about your dietary preferences, then don’t order? A few days later, you’ll likely get a sweet Hungryroot coupon code in your inbox. New subscription plans usually also come with free treats.

    If you cancel or pause an existing account, you may also receive a Hungryroot promo code offering your $50 or even $100 off your next order, as an incentive to return.

    Hungryroot retention offers will be different for each customer vary per customer, because offers are usually customized to previous orders—or the answers you gave on Hungryroot’s culinary preferences quiz.

    Get Free Gifts for Life With Hungryroot

    New HungryRoot customers almost always will get a promo code for a free gift. In some ways, choose carefully: This gift remains steady, as a “lifetime” offer. Generally you’ll choose among fresh produce, a premium protein, or just some tasty pre-packaged snacks. These will keep arriving with every delivery: Make sure it’s something you like! Click here for more information about free Hungryroot gifts.

    Science Reveals the Surprising Origins of the Potato

    by: Jorge Garay

    Potatoes as we know them today are the product of a hybridization that took place 9 million years ago between two plants, one of which was an ancestor of the tomato.

    Science Reveals the Surprising Origins of the Potato

    Potatoes as we know them today are the product of a hybridization that took place 9 million years ago between two plants, one of which was an ancestor of the tomato.
    Tomatoes and potatoes
    Photograph: Korneeva Kristina/GETTY IMAGES

    There are more than a hundred ways to prepare a potato, and thousands of stories have begun with a shot of vodka distilled from this tuber. For centuries, the potato has been instrumental in feeding the world’s growing population. According to one study, the introduction of the potato from the Americas accounted for about a quarter of the population growth in the Old World between 1700 and 1900.

    Now, science reveals the vegetable’s surprising origins: It emerged 9 million years ago as a result of an unusual hybridization between an ancestor of the tomato and an ancient South American plant. This revelation rewrites the evolutionary history of one of the world’s most widely consumed foods and also explains how a simple tuber became a mainstay of the global diet.

    Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences conducted the most extensive genomic analysis to date on the domesticated potato. They studied cultivated varieties along with 44 wild species, conducting unprecedented genetic sequencing. The results revealed a stable mixture of genetic material between Solanum tuberosum (the traditional potato) and an ancestor of Solanum lycopersicum (the tomato).

    The finding suggests that potatoes as we know them today arose from a process of hybridization between an ancient tomato plant and other Solanum-related species from the Etuberosum family that, until then, did not produce tubers. The results have been published in the journal Cell.

    Both the potato and the tomato share a common ancestor that lived about 13 million years ago. Four million years later, their descendants successfully interbred. From this union emerged a new plant with the ability to form tubers: subway structures that store energy in the form of carbohydrates and allow reproduction without the need for seeds or pollination. This biological innovation facilitated the expansion of the first potatoes into regions with diverse climates, from warm to cold environments.

    The study also identified revealing genetic details. The SP6A gene, considered the “switch” that determines whether a plant will develop tubers, comes from the tomato. On the other hand, the IT1 gene, which regulates the growth of the subway stems that form the edible tuber, comes from plants of the Etuberosum family, native to South America.

    By considering the chronology of the hybridization and the geolocation of the species involved, the researchers proposed a hypothesis about the origin of the potato. During the Miocene, between 10 and 6 million years ago, the abrupt geological uplift of the Andes, driven by the collision of two tectonic plates, generated new cold climatic regions. Scientists believe this geological change forced plants to adapt to survive and expand, with two of them joining together to form Solanum tuberosum, which millions of years later would end up accompanying your hamburger in the form of French fries.

    This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

    8 Best Handheld Gaming Consoles (2025), Tested and Reviewed

    by: Brad Bourque

    The second golden age of portable gaming is here. These are the top gadgets for taking your video games on the go.

    The Best Handheld Game Consoles

    The second golden age of portable gaming is here. These are the top gadgets for taking your video games on the go.

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    Featured in this article
    Best Handheld Game Console
    Nintendo Switch 2
    Read more
    Still Great
    Nintendo Switch OLED
    Read more
    Best for PC Gamers
    Valve Steam Deck
    Read more
    Best Upgrade for PC Gamers
    Valve Steam Deck OLED
    Read more

    Alternatives

    These aren't our top picks, but are still handheld options we'd recommend over others.

    MSI Claw 8 AI+ for $1,000: MSI has had a roller-coaster few years with its handheld game consoles, but all the deeply broken and flawed hardware has finally led to the Claw 8 AI+, which is a powerful entry. The hardware is beautiful, the button layout is well-done and ergonomic, despite the large size, and performance has been great. I've enjoyed failing miserably in Sekiro and have collected far too many acorns in Squirrel With a Gun. The 1080p screen has a 120-Hz refresh rate and is sharp and smooth. Unfortunately, the biggest problem is the fact that it runs Windows. MSI's Center M software is also not intuitive to use, and I've run into a few bugs where the controls stop working. Worse yet, the console is difficult to find in stock. It's a shame because this is finally a good MSI handheld, but its high price and availability issues just make it inaccessible to most.

    Asus ROG Ally X for $900: The Asus ROG Ally X (6/10, WIRED Review) still can't entirely overcome the jank that comes with Windows. It also doesn't have as many unique and interesting features as the Lenovo Legion Go. But it does have one thing that the other Windows handhelds don't have: a massive battery. With an 80-Wh battery, this thing can store more juice than many gaming laptops. That's not just a nice-to-have; it's essential, since Windows tends to burn through battery faster than other platforms. It's still not enough to reach good battery life, per se, but it's what I would consider acceptable. I got nearly three hours out of Doom Eternal and a little longer playing Hades II. No other Windows handheld I've tested (including the Legion Go) lasts that long, which is a bit sad, but it still makes this the best option for longer gaming sessions.

    Nintendo Switch Lite for $197: The Switch Lite (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is the cheapest version of the Switch, but not by a ton. It lacks detachable controllers, and you can't dock it to play on your TV. This is for portable gaming exclusively. If you're fine with that, then you can save a little money with this version, but if you want to play with separate controllers or on your TV–or if you're just unsure–then it's probably worth spending a little extra on the Switch OLED. I don't think it's worth buying an original Switch anymore.

    Try Cloud Streaming Instead

    Instead of buying a new device just for gaming on the go, you could use the phone you already have in your pocket. The latest phones have high-resolution and high-refresh OLED panels, great battery life, and fast data connections required for multiplayer or streaming. For all of these options, a proper controller will help the experience a lot. We have a guide with clamp and stand-alone controllers that work with iPhone and Android, so make sure to check that out if you decide to go the streaming route.

    Photograph: Simon Hill

    Steam Link (iOS, Google Play): If you have a gaming PC and a fast internet connection, you can run games locally and then stream them to any device that can run the Steam Link app. I'm really impressed by how easy this option is to get up and running, and it even has built-in customizable touch controls, so you can fire it up without any additional hardware. This is my preferred option for gaming on my phone, assuming I'm not just crushing hands of Balatro.

    Nvidia GeForce Now: Nvidia was one of the early options for cloud gaming, and GeForce Now (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is still a great option for PC gamers who don't have the latest hardware. It uses your existing library of owned games from various platforms, but runs them on Nvidia servers for more consistent performance. There's a free version with an hour session cap, among other limitations, but a premium membership allows you to skip the queues and play for longer, while getting more performance.

    Xbox Cloud Gaming: Though technically still in beta, Microsoft has been slowly expanding the Xbox walls to include PC gamers, and now streaming. Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can stream a selection of Game Pass games to their mobile device. This option has a subscription fee and limited games compared to the other options, but if you're already on Game Pass Ultimate, it's worth checking out.

    Avoid These Gaming Handhelds

    This space has been flooded with handhelds, and not all of them are great. Some of them are so bad that I would argue no one should buy them at all.

    Asus ROG Ally: The ROG Ally had a lot of potential, but it didn't pan out. It has the same jank as other Windows-based handhelds, and unreasonably low battery life, even by gaming handheld standards. Updates, since it came out, improved it enough to merit including this one in our Honorable Mentions in the past, but now that the ROG Ally X is out—and often for not much more money than the original—it's hard to recommend this one anymore.

    Logitech G Cloud: For this handheld, Logitech took a page out of the PlayStation Portal's playbook, focusing on streaming first. Unfortunately, it doesn't do it as well. For starters, it's considerably more expensive at $300, plus it requires a subscription to streaming services like GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming. It struggles more than other devices I've tested at streaming games, and its ability to run games locally via Android is similarly not very robust.

    What’s Inside the Tiny Miracle Food Pouches That Can Save the Lives of Starving Gazans

    by: Alex Christian

    Packed with calories and protein, the same magic mixture has successfully treated famine for decades—but due to funding cuts it's now in short supply.

    What’s Inside the Tiny Miracle Food Pouches That Can Save the Lives of Starving Gazans

    Packed with calories and protein, the same magic mixture has successfully treated famine for decades—but due to funding cuts it's now in short supply.
    Image may contain Advertisement Poster Person Text and Paper
    Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Nutriset; Getty Images

    Take a peanut-based paste packed with 500 calories and nearly 13 grams of protein. Store it in a 92-gram foil pouch, so it can be easily sucked by starving infants on the front line. No water or refrigeration is required, meaning it can be distributed in drought-hit areas and stored at ambient temperature for up to two years. Just a couple of daily sachets can lead to a 10 percent weight gain over six weeks, sustaining recovery from severe acute malnutrition for less than $60 per child. Saving a life, it turns out, literally costs peanuts: just 71 cents a serving.

    This life-saving mixture is Plumpy’Nut. Developed by Normandy-based manufacturer Nutriset in 1996 by French paediatrician André Briend, it was the first ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF): energy-dense pastes that have boosted survival rates of severe acute malnutrition in children from less than 25 per cent to around 90 percent.

    The paste has saved tens of millions of lives. “It’s incredibly effective emergency food,” says medical doctor Steve Collins, founder of advocacy group Valid Nutrition. “RUTF contains all the essential nutrients required for someone to recover from severe acute malnutrition. They’re easy to transport, extremely energy dense, and don’t require a cold supply chain or clean water to work.”

    While Nutriset's product was the first RUTF to be developed, it is not the only brand in this important field. Mana, for example, is an American-made RUTF produced in Fitzgerald, Georgia. The company states it can make 500,000 pounds of product per day—enough to fill four shipping containers, and feed 10 million children per year.

    Before Plumpy’Nut, cases of severe acute malnutrition—primarily occurring among children under 5 years old, diagnosed by very low weight-for-height scores and arm circumference—needed round-the-clock care at therapeutic feeding centres. Nurses at these makeshift hospitals in often remote areas would feed infants F100, a high-energy milk powder also made by Nutriset. Bacteria was often rife. “There was always a risk that water was contaminated and carried disease,” says Collins. It's one of the reasons why mortality rates for in-patient care lurked at around 20 percent.

    Over half of Plumpy’Nut is made from peanut paste and vegetable oils. The nutty primary base contains fat-soluble nutrients, as well as protein, energy, and fatty acids that spark recovery. Nearly a quarter is skimmed milk powder, containing dairy protein and essential amino acids, the building blocks of protein. Another quarter is reserved for sugar—masking the taste of the added micronutrients: potassium, magnesium, calcium, iron, zinc, iodine, copper, selenium, and vitamins A, D, E, B complex, C, and K.

    The apocryphal story is that Briend’s idea for the marvel that is Plumpy’Nut came from a jar of Nutella. In reality, it came from firsthand experience on the front line in the Sahel: The water-based solution wasn’t working—infants were still dying. Working with Nutriset founder Michel Lescanne, his idea was to add F100 to a spread of peanuts (a common crop in areas of malnutrition and a natural protein-rich source) with oil and sugar.

    High in calories, low in maintenance, Plumpy’Nut didn’t require cooling nor mixing before eating. Its oil base removed the risk of bacterial contamination. And most of its energy is released through fat, meaning quick absorption of micronutrients.

    Employees in 2005 at Nutriset working on the peanut-based RUTF Plumpy'nut manufacturing line in Malaunay in Normandy, France. The recipe remains practically unchanged 20 years later.

    Photograph: ROBERT FRANCOIS/Getty Images

    The premade RUTF sachet is a magic formula, says Collins. In starvation cases, refeeding syndrome can occur, a life-threatening metabolic condition in which nutrition that's too rapidly reintroduced leads to electrolyte imbalance. But RUTFs mean children can safely gain weight. “As opposed to highly-concentrated formulas, where a child could easily overeat, parents can simply give their child RUTF and it’s safe—the only limiting factor is appetite.”

    Collins first came across Plumpy’Nut in the 1998 Sudan famine, where he set up therapeutic feeding centers. “I quickly realized this was the future,” he says, “and that these sachets had to be administered at home, not at in-patient facilities.” He helped establish Plumpy’Nut’s first widescale rollout during the 2000 Ethiopia famine, and pioneered a new community-based model: Parents would provide the emergency food rather than health care workers. It was adopted by the United Nations in 2004, and mortality rates for severe acute malnutrition with RUTF treatment are now typically under 5 percent.

    Besides reduced sachet plastic and minor refinement of vitamin and mineral premixes, Plumpy’Nut remains nearly the same 30 years on. “No changes to the formulation have ever been done,” says Salima Boitout, group communication manager at Nutriset. It’s still the RUTF gold standard. UNICEF is its number-one customer, distributing around 80 percent of the world’s supply. It’s why, despite the 20-year international patent expiring by 2018, very few alternative products have emerged, as they must meet strict technical composition guidelines set by the WHO and UNICEF.

    Some RUTF have reached Gaza—but supplies are rapidly dwindling. Amid mounting evidence of widespread starvation and famine, these sachets are the number one treatment, says Emmanuel Berbain, nutrition adviser at Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). “From what we’ve seen on the ground, we’re in a famine situation already, where deterioration isn’t a matter of months, weeks, or days—it’s hours.”

    There were at least 63 malnutrition-related deaths in the Gaza Strip in July, including 24 children under 5, according to data from the WHO. Since May, aid has been run by the Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), led by private American contractors. Only four distribution centers are open to feed a population of more than 2 million.

    Berbain says plenty of RUTF sachets lie at Israel’s borders. More than 6,000 aid trucks, waiting in Egypt and Jordan, some only miles away from the Gazan border, are loaded with emergency food and medicine. But according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa), Israel has denied entry. Authorities have since announced that a daily convoy of 200 aid trucks can enter the strip. “We know how to treat starvation, it’s nothing new, and used in nearly every humanitarian crisis this century,” adds Berbain. “Distributing pasta isn’t enough—you need to cook it, which isn’t feasible for many people. And a diet of just wheat can lead to malnourishment.”

    Due to funding cuts, only around 36,000 tons of Plumpy’Nut RUTF was produced worldwide in 2024—approximately 1 million sachets a day.

    Photograph: Nutriset

    As starvation bites and famine takes hold, MSF nutrition clinics in Gaza are fast running out of RUTF stock, claims Berbain. But there are broader supply chain concerns. The shuttering of USAID has led to hundreds of thousands of boxes of Plumpy’Nut sachets collecting dust in warehouses around the world.

    With global aid distribution networks throttled, one stockpile includes 5,000 tons of Plumpy'Nut, worth $13 million, that could feed more than 484,000 children, according to US manufacturer Edesia. Part of Nutriset’s PlumpyField global network, the Rhode Island site has operational capacity for 1.5 million Plumpy’Nut sachets a day—a sizable chunk of the 134,198 total tons of all Nutriset products processed by producers in 2023. However, due to funding cuts, just 72,000 tons of Nutriset RUTF and supplements were produced worldwide in 2024, half of which was Plumpy’Nut—approximately 1 million sachets a day.

    US foreign aid cuts are also depleting UNICEF’s RUTF stocks. It warned in March that supply was running short in 17 countries, affecting 2.4 million children suffering from severe acute malnutrition. Widespread famine is also occurring in Sudan. “The pipeline is drying up,” says Kirk Prichard, vice president of programs for humanitarian charity Concern US. “Cameroon is expected to run out of RUTF this month, with Nigeria and Somalia soon to follow.”

    The US Department of State, which now administers foreign assistance programs following the official closure of USAID on July 1, didn’t respond to a WIRED request for comment.

    Collins has now developed a plant-based emergency food with similar efficacy to Plumpy’Nut but made with soy, maize, and sorghum. It could be the future of RUTF, provided to children with hidden lactose intolerance or peanut allergies. But funding for the project dried up in 2021, meaning Valid Nutrition's factory in Malawi had to be closed. The group is now exploring third-party processors to manufacture the product.

    Collins believes it’s symptomatic of a broader problem that’s completely man-made: Politics often comes before the lives of innocent, starving people. “With humanitarian access and space to operate, you could treat all cases in Gaza within a week with RUTF,” he says. “Without it, recovery rates will be low and slow. They’ll be more vulnerable to death.”

    The US Military Is Raking in Millions From On-Base Slot Machines

    by: Molly Longman

    The Defense Department operates slot machines on US military bases overseas, raising millions of dollars to fund recreation for troops—and creating risks for soldiers prone to gambling addiction.

    The Big Money and High Cost of the US Military’s On-Base Slot Machines

    The Defense Department operates slot machines on US military bases overseas, raising millions of dollars to fund recreation for troops—and creating risks for soldiers prone to gambling addiction.
    Image may contain Gambling Game Slot Mace Club Weapon and Helmet
    PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: ANJALI NAIR; GETTY IMAGES

    When Dave Yeager stumbled upon the chamber of shiny, casino-style slot machines, he felt an instant pull. It was his first night of deployment in Seoul, South Korea, and the United States Army officer was in a bad headspace. The September 11, 2001, attacks had just happened, and he had a wife and two children under the age of 5 at home whom he missed fiercely. He felt lost.

    Yeager had never seen a slot machine on a military base before—there weren’t any in the US—but he figured trying his luck couldn’t make things worse. “As I’m sitting there, the first thing I’m noticing is that my shoulders are relaxing,” Yeager remembers. “Then, I won. In that moment, all the stress, the anxiety, the pain, the hurt, the fear—it washed away.”

    Pulling the slot machine’s levers felt like a salve—until they didn’t. Yeager found another room filled with slot machines at his next base. Over a period of about three months, he spiraled into what he says was a “devastating obsession” with playing the military-run casino games. He eventually drained his savings, sold his stuff, even stole from his unit. He didn’t tell anyone what was going on. “I thought no one could help me,” he says.

    While not everyone who plays the slots struggles like Yeager did, a growing body of evidence indicates that veterans and service members are more likely to struggle with gambling disorders than civilians, says Shane W. Kraus, an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies gambling disorders. Service members also tend to be more hesitant to seek help, out of fear of losing rank, security clearance, or being dishonorably discharged, he adds.

    Not much has changed since Yeager served—in fact, within the last five years, the slot machine programs the military runs have been making increasing amounts of cash. And, some advocates say, they’re not funneling enough of what they make into education on problem gambling.

    Drafted Into Debt

    The Army Recreation Machine Program (ARMP) currently operates 1,889 slot machines in 79 locations abroad, including Korea, Japan, and Germany, according to Neil Gumbs, general manager, Army Recreation Machine Program (ARMP) Installation Management Command (IMCOM). The ARMP brought in $70.9 million from its slot machine operations during the 2024 fiscal year, according to a document obtained by WIRED. That year, the ARMP made $53 million in net proceeds. (The ARMP program covers slots on Army, Navy, and Marine Corps bases, while the Air Force also has their own version of the program.)

    Those figures have been increasing. In the fiscal year 2023, the ARMP brought in $64.8 million in revenue, with $48.9 million in net proceeds. The year before, it made $63.1 million in revenue with net proceeds of $47.3 million, according to documents obtained through a public records request made by this reporter through the Data Liberation Project.

    From October 2024 to May 2025, the ARMP’s “house” has had some solid wins. They generated about $47.7 million from players in that period, records obtained by WIRED show. Comparatively, the total return to players from October 2024 to May 2025 was about $37 million in reportable jackpots over $1,200.

    In its heyday, the ARMP brought in over $100 million in revenue, per a 2017 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), but money-in dwindled substantially between 2010 to 2020, which Gumbs attributed to “movement and reductions in force and installations.” Things began to grow again after 2020. This was partly a boost from Covid-19 boredom, along with “renewed investment in new equipment and cost/expense reductions aided in increasing entertainment on offer,” Gumbs says.

    This was a few years after the ARMP installed “Morning Calm,” a popular gambling room on the Army base Camp Humphreys in South Korea (likely a reference to the country’s nickname, “The Land of the Morning Calm”). Slots at the Morning Calm location bring in considerably more than other bases, securing the ARMP more than $6 million from October 2024 through May 2025. Second place? “Ocean Breeze” at Camp Butler/Foster in Japan.

    With names like that, you’d think these locations were offering serenity—not siphoning savings. But folks like Yeager claim that’s exactly what they’re doing.

    When asked for comment on Yeager’s experience, the ARMP’s Gumbs said: “ARMP is affiliated with the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG). Additionally, we promote responsible gambling, and all gaming areas and machines prominently display the national gambling hotline number.” A spokesperson for the NCPG notes that the ARMP became a member as of June 2025, after WIRED began looking into this story.

    The ARMP also says it tracks which kinds of gaming machines people play the most, and how much revenue comes from each kind. For instance, 88 Fortunes—a progressive jackpot game inspired by Asian culture—is one of the most popular. It brought in more than $3 million to the house between October 2024 and May 2025. Another game, Novomatic Impera HD 5, brought in $4.3 million during that period.

    Operations like Morning Calm appear much more organized than what Yeager remembers from his time in the service: “It’s like they had an extra back room, so they threw 50 slot machines in there,” Yeager recalls. He describes some rooms as the size of an average fast-food chain dining room, though the one he played in most in Seoul had maybe 200 machines. He says the atmosphere is “club-like” and dark.

    Not all of ARMP cash is coming from service members—local civilians, retirees, veterans, and contractors who work on bases can also play—but a portion of the money the house generates is taken from a vulnerable population that’s literally putting their existence on the line for their country.

    The money doesn’t go into thin air. The ARMP’s earnings go back into each branch’s Morale, Welfare, and Recreation (MWR). Some of it pays for entertainment on bases, such as golf courses, bowling alleys, and libraries. “Proceeds that are returned to MWR are decided and allocated by the garrison commander at each installation,” Gumbs tells WIRED via email. (Garrison commanders are leaders sometimes described as “city managers” of Army installations.) Yeager and other experts say the work the MWR does is important. But he and other experts argue that the military must invest more in prevention, education, and treatment from problem gambling.

    Slot History

    Even though Congress banned gambling devices from domestic US bases in 1951, it’s done little to curb the ARMP on bases abroad. In the early 2000s, Congress asked the Pentagon to study how on-base slots impacted military families like Yeager’s. The Pentagon originally hired consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to do the study, but within months ended the contract to complete the research itself. Rachel Volberg, who worked on the original PricewaterhouseCoopers report, tells WIRED that, while she was never told exactly why they decided to take it in-house, she got the strong impression “they didn't want the money to disappear because they were using it to fund recreational activities for enlisted folks.” She remembers chaplains as the main authority figures in leadership who took the issue seriously.

    The final report didn’t reference new problem-gambling rates, but noted that the military couldn’t keep many of its morale operations like golf courses running “without slot machine revenue or a significant new source of cash.”

    Volberg now studies problem gambling at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.# Asked for comment on the PricewaterhouseCoopers report, an IMCOM spokesperson, referred WIRED to the Pentagon, which referred WIRED back to the Army. The Army’s Public Affairs team also didn’t respond to a request from WIRED on this matter.

    After the 2017 GAO report raised concerns, Congress passed a provision under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which, for the first time, required screening for gambling disorders every year for service members. A 2018 bill that would have required the DOD to create policies and programs to prevent and treat gambling disorders failed to gain traction.

    Last year, US representative Paul Tonko, a New York Democrat, proposed an amendment to the NDAA that would ban the operation of slots on bases. That didn’t pass either. “Our brave service men and women sacrifice everything,” Tonko tells WIRED. “We must do all we can to support them by confronting problem gambling head-on.”

    Perhaps counterintuitively, Yeager disagrees with abolishing the ARMP outright. “They do generate money for good causes,” he says, noting that having recreation on bases is key, particularly since eliminating the slots won’t eliminate ways to bet online, or the boredom and anxiety many service members feel.

    Instead, he wishes the ARMP would dedicate more of its millions to helping folks struggling like he did. “Rather than just eliminate them, why don’t you mandate a small percentage of that money be turned back over into education, screening, and treatment?” Yeager says. He’d like to see a broad education campaign and more controls.

    Other advocates want to see more money put into research and treatment programs, along with adding responsible gambling tools and information, says Cait Huble, communications director for the NCPG. In a 2022 review of the DOD’s responsible gambling policies compared with those of US states, the Kindbridge Research Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on gambling-related issues faced by veterans and other groups, found the DOD had the worst, compared to other jurisdictions with legal slot machine gambling in America.

    When asked for comment on this report and whether more responsible gambling tools have been put in place since the Kindbridge review, Gumbs said that “proceeds that are returned to MWR are decided and allocated by the garrison commander at each installation,” and reiterated ARMP’s affiliation with NCPG and its commitment to “responsible gambling.” Another IMCOM spokesperson tells WIRED the NCPG partnership “provides us with insights, tools, and materials that help increase the visibility of responsible gaming at our locations, while also keeping ARMP aligned with the broader industry and any real-time updates from NCPG.”

    In 2020, the Army updated its regulations to “provide information” to both soldiers and civilians about problem gambling. However, Huble says this isn’t enough. “Checking the box and saying: ‘We have information, there's a brochure in the health office,’ it's certainly different than making sure that clinicians and even commanders are trained in how to handle a situation where a soldier says they have a gambling problem.”

    Meanwhile, another GAO report on problem gambling is expected, but some, like responsible gambling lobbyist Brianne Doura-Schawohl, say it’s “long overdue.” It’s also unclear how recent funding cuts by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the administration of President Donald Trump, a former casino mogul, will impact the report and future policy.

    Yeager says that any recent DOD updates to gambling prevention policy have been “rudimentary at best,” adding: “There’s still a long way to go.”

    Clear and Present Danger

    For years, Yeager felt that neither the Army nor the Department of Veterans Affairs knew how to help him. That is, until 2007. He showed up to the VA (not for the first time) looking for help. By this time, he’d been disciplined and eventually released by the Army for his gambling, had separated from his wife, and survived multiple suicide attempts. Finally, a counselor dug through her desk and procured a pamphlet. “I swear to god, she blew the dust off of it before handing it to me,” he says.

    It mentioned one of the VA’s few gambling treatment programs in the country, located in Ohio. This was what finally helped him. Now, he’s in recovery, spending his time working to improve the way the DOD handles problem gambling. “Because I didn’t fulfill my obligation as a noncommissioned officer, I try to fulfill it now as a veteran in recovery,” he says. “This is where I try to pay it forward.”

    If Yeager could talk to defense secretary Pete Hegseth today, he has one main message to get across, starting but not ending with the gambling rooms “where the seed of gambling disorder was planted,” he says. “Educating soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen that this is a real addiction and that there’s treatment that could improve readiness and could bring people out of the woodwork who are scared to go to treatment,” he says. “It would not be difficult to do.”

    For those struggling with problem gambling, you can contact 1-800-GAMBLER for the National Problem Gambling Helpline.

    Meet Ultra Skelly: Skelly the Skeleton Gets a High-Tech Edition This Halloween

    by: Nena Farrell

    The new 6'5'' version of Skelly has digital eyeballs, audio options, and a motion sensor. It’s available to buy starting today.

    High-Tech Skelly Is Here for Halloween

    The new 6'5'' version of Home Depot’s viral skeleton has digital eyeballs, audio options, and a motion sensor. It’s available to buy starting today.
    Image may contain Skeleton and Person
    Courtesy of Home Depot

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    I know you've seen Skelly at some point in the past five years. Maybe it was driving around your neighborhood during Halloween, or on a viral post about Halloween decorations. Maybe both! Maybe it's in your friend's yard year-round, wearing a Santa hat for Christmas and rocking 2025 glasses with a bottle of champagne for the new year. (Maybe that's just my friend's yard.)

    The popular 12-foot skeleton, aptly named Skelly, has become a Halloween classic (and a permanent yard mainstay for the Halloween elite) since it launched in 2020. This year, Home Depot is launching a few new items in its Halloween collection, including a brand-new, tech-powered Ultra Skelly ($279).

    Ultra Skelly is the souped-up tech edition of original Skelly, with customizable ribcage lights and eyes, four movements it can perform, preset and custom audio recordings it can repeat, a live audio option, and a motion sensor to activate it. It's shorter than the 12-foot icon, but 6 1/2 feet is nothing to scoff at, either. That just means Ultra Skelly can fit next to your front door and jump-scare your trick-or-treaters.

    Ultra Fun

    Courtesy of Home Depot

    On the visual side, there's a light built into Ultra Skelly's mouth and chest, both of which have a full spectrum of color you can choose from in the newly revamped DecorPro SVI app (Android and iOs), which Home Depot launched last week. The most fun visual, though, is Skelly's new LCD eyes, which feature 18 different styles to choose from. There are options for both Halloween and holidays beyond, from skull and red human eyes to hearts, snowflakes, and birthday confetti. There are also a handful of non-holiday options, like blue, green, and brown eyes.

    As for the audio and animatronics, Ultra Skelly has four movements with its head, mouth, arm, and torso that you can control. This high-tech skeleton also comes with five preset audio recordings and the ability to record up to 30 seconds of your own audio, which you can manipulate with eerie voice modulation. There's a live audio mode too, if you wanted to speak through Ultra Skelly while sitting out of sight.

    The DecorPro SVI app works with Bluetooth, so you'll need to be within range to customize Ultra Skelly and use live audio. Ultra Skelly doesn't connect to Wi-Fi, so it's not technically smart, but it still packs plenty of futuristic fun for the holidays.

    Beyond Ultra

    Courtesy of Home Depot

    Ultra Skelly isn't the only new addition to the skeleton family. There's a new version of Skelly's best friend: a 5-foot Sitting Skelly's Dog ($249) that will also have customizable eyes. The 7-foot standing version ($199) of the dog is back as well. This year, cat people will also be recognized with a new 5-foot Skelly's Cat ($199). The original 12-foot Skelly ($299) will return, and after a year of price raises across markets, it's nice to see it has actually stayed the same price. This regular Skelly also has customizable LCD eyes, albeit with only eight options. Ultra Skelly ($279) is actually the cheaper of the two Skelly options, even with all its cool features, but it is nearly half the size.

    All of these are available today on Home Depot’s website and in the Home Depot app, along with the rest of Home Depot’s Halloween collections. If you’re looking for something else fun, don't miss the 15-foot haunted scarecrow ($399), 8-foot animated Wyvern ($399), and so much more. Happy Halloween, my fellow spooky friends.

    A Hiker Was Missing for Nearly a Year—Until an AI System Recognized His Helmet

    by: Marta Abbà

    Using AI to analyze thousands of frames taken by drone, The Piedmontese Alpine Rescue team has found the body of a doctor who had been missing since September 2024.

    A Hiker Was Missing for Nearly a Year. Then an AI System Spotted His Helmet

    Using AI to analyze thousands of frames taken by drone, a mountain rescue team has found the body of a doctor who had been missing since September 2024.
    Drone on Monviso locating the body of a missing hiker.
    Drone on Monviso locating the body of a missing hiker.Photograph: CNSAS

    How long does it take to identify the helmet of a hiker lost in a 183-hectare mountain area, analyzing 2,600 frames taken by a drone from approximately 50 meters away? If done with a human eye, weeks or months. If analyzed by an artificial intelligence system, one afternoon. The National Alpine and Speleological Rescue Corps, known by it’s Italian initialism CNSAS, relied on AI to find the body of a person missing in Italy's Piedmont region on the north face of Monviso—the highest peak in the Cottian Alps—since September 2024.

    According to Saverio Isola, the CNSAS drone pilot who intervened along with his colleague Giorgio Viana, the operation—including searching for any sign of the missing hiker, the discovery and recovery of his body, and a stoppage due to bad weather—lasted less than three days.

    The Recovery Operations

    With his back to the ground, his gaze fixed on the mountains, 600 meters below the summit, the body of 64-year-old Ligurian doctor Nicola Ivaldo was found on the morning of Thursday, July 31, more than 10 months after his disappearance, thanks to his helmet that clashed with the rest of the landscape.

    "It was the AI software that identified some pixels of a different color in the images taken on Tuesday," explains Isola, reconstructing step-by-step the operation that led to the discovery and recovery of the remains located at an altitude of approximately 3,150 meters, in the rightmost of the three ravines that cut through the north face of Monviso, above a hanging glacier.

    The team collected all the images in five hours with just two drones on the morning of Tuesday, July 29, and analyzed them using AI software during the afternoon of the same day. By that evening, the rescuers already had a series of "suspicious spots" to check. Only fog and bad weather the following day delayed the operations.

    "We woke up at 4 am to reach a very distant point with good visibility on the channel where the red pixels had been detected, and we used the drone to see if it was indeed the helmet," says Isola. "Then we took all the necessary photos and measurements, sending the information to the rescue coordination center, which was then able to dispatch the Fire Brigade helicopter for the recovery and police operations."

    The Role of AI

    Every drone operation is part of a rigorous method developed by CNSAS in coordination with ENAC, the national agency that oversees civil aviation. "We've been using drones for about five years, and for about a year and a half we've been integrating color and shape recognition technologies, developing them month by month," Isola explains. "But all of this would be useless without the teams of technicians."

    Information from Ivaldo's cell phone was immediately invaluable. The two drone pilots who navigated the area were aided by the experience and knowledge of four expert mountain rescuers. "It's a human achievement, but without technology, it would have been an impossible mission. It's a team success," said Isola.

    Isola, his colleague Viana, and the few other "select pilots" from the CNSAS know well how crucial technology can be if used properly. "Even in the recovery operations following the Marmolada Glacier tragedy, it allowed us to operate in inaccessible areas and recover all the necessary artifacts," Isola recalls. "It prevented the rescuers from risking their lives."

    The CNSAS goal is further collaboration between artificial intelligence and drones to prevent the most serious consequences of mountain accidents and save missing people while they are still alive. This combination can also be used to obtain and analyze information with thermal imaging cameras, which are sensitive only to living beings.

    "Just like with still images, AI is also able to interpret thermal data and provide valuable information in just a few hours," Isola explains. "In Sardinia, a colleague recently rescued some climbers whose ropes were stuck on a rock face and was able to locate them only thanks to the drone and other technologies that are part of our method. Many of them are from wartime; we have recovered and converted them."

    The hope is that, with ever-increasing use, the number of fatal mountain accidents can be drastically reduced.

    This story originally appeared on WIRED Italy and has been translated from Italian.

    The Nintendo Switch 2’s Biggest Problem Is Already Storage

    by: Matt Kamen

    In 2025, 256 gigabytes just isn’t enough, and tacking on more storage isn’t as easy as it sounds.

    The Nintendo Switch 2’s Biggest Problem Is Already Storage

    In 2025, 256 gigabytes just isn’t enough, and tacking on more storage isn’t as easy as it sounds.
    Image may contain Computer Computer Hardware Computer Keyboard Electronics Hardware Green Phone and Mobile Phone
    Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff/Getty Images

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    The Nintendo Switch 2 is fantastic—already a contender for the biggest gaming hardware launch of 2025. I'm still playing it daily—monkeying around in Donkey Kong Bananza, enjoying tearing up its destructible game worlds, whether I'm playing on the big screen or tucked up in bed with handheld mode.

    Unfortunately, just two months on from release, my console’s drive is already full. Since my copy of Bananza is digital, I've had to start juggling game installs to experience the great ape’s latest adventure. I'm probably an outlier in having maxed out capacity already, but storage anxiety is an issue that's likely to worsen for many users over the Switch 2's lifespan, and there don't appear to be any easy fixes on the horizon.

    Storage Wars

    Image may contain: Electronics, Mobile Phone, Phone, Camera, Computer, Person, and Screen
    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    At a glance, the Switch 2's storage situation looks rosy. The console itself comes with 256 GB, which is eight times more than the original Switch's paltry 32 GB and four times the 64 GB of the Switch OLED. System software on Switch 2 is impressively small, using a smidge over 6 GB, leaving owners with a generous-sounding ~249 GB. The problem is that 249 GB ain't what it used to be, and the Switch 2 demands you use far more of that storage than the original Switch did.

    The latest generation of performance, such as 4K HDR output, is necessary as Nintendo competes against both home console rivals Sony and Microsoft, and the growing number of handheld gaming PCs aiming for the Switch's portable gaming crown. However, improvements mean bigger installs for Switch 2 native games, eating up more and more of that precious space.

    While Nintendo has mastered getting big results from small game sizes—open-world racer Mario Kart World is 24 GB digitally, while Donkey Kong Bananza clocks in at a mere 8.7 GB—other developers aren't as trim. JRPG Bravely Default HD, a remaster of a Nintendo 3DS game, eats up 11 GB (albeit likely down to its significant original mini games that use the Switch 2's mouse mode controls), while co-op adventure Split Fiction demands a staggering 69.2 GB—over a quarter of the internal storage for that one game alone.

    If you think that sounds like an incentive to embrace physical media instead, saving space for digital-only games … well, you'd be right. Unfortunately, on Switch 2, that's not the option it once was.

    A Key Problem

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    The issue is exacerbated by Nintendo's introduction of GameKey Cards for some physical games. These don't have games installed on them, merely a bearer token that allows users to download a game digitally while requiring the cartridge to be inserted to play it. Although at the time of writing, Nintendo itself hasn't released any of its first-party games in the GameKey Card format, almost every third-party game released for the Switch 2 has opted for GKCs (Cyberpunk 2077 is a notable exception; the entire game is on the cartridge).

    I maintain that GameKey Cards are a significant improvement for collectors over the original Switch's code-in-a-box releases. GKCs can be traded in or sold, since access to the game is tied to the cartridge rather than a user account, and they don't leave collectors with an empty, useless case after a single-use download code has been redeemed. But the format's inescapable drawback is that it demands yet more of the Switch 2's already over-stretched storage.

    Switch 2 cartridges that can house game data are limited to 64 GB, further compounding the issue. Even if publisher EA wanted to release Split Fiction on a cartridge—its "physical" release is code-in-a-box, not even a GKC—the mammoth install size couldn't fit on the cards available. Larger cards could help here, but given the bespoke design, they may prove prohibitively expensive to produce.

    Plus, if third parties aren't using current 64-GB cards—chonkers such as Hitman: World of Assassination (61 GB), Street Fighter 6 (48.2 GB), and Yakuza 0: Director's Cut (45.3 GB) could all fit, but instead are released as GKCs—is there any point in doubling the size and cost? As it stands, players have no alternative but to bid adieu to even more storage if any of those games take their fancy.

    The Backward Compatibility Compromise

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    One of the best things about the Switch 2 is its near-universal backward compatibility. Here, physical games have an edge, as Switch 1 carts have the actual game data, while digitally owned Switch 1 titles claim more virtual real estate alongside ballooning Switch 2 titles.

    Physical Switch 1 cartridges aren't immune to data bloat on the Switch 2, though. While many Switch 1 games see a performance boost running on Switch 2, benefiting from faster load times and improved frame rates, Nintendo is releasing upgrade packs for key titles—think of them as optional downloadable remasters. If you want The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to look its absolute best on Switch 2, that pack demands 9.7 GB of space, even if you have your original physical copy of the game. The fully digital release leaps from around 14 to 24 GB with the upgrade, or roughly 10 percent of the Switch 2's storage.

    Beyond original Switch games and upgrades gobbling up precious storage, the Switch 2 also sees the addition of GameCube titles to the retro library available to Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers. Like the classic games available for earlier consoles such as the NES, SNES, or Game Boy, these are all packaged in one launcher, with every game in the respective collection installed at once.

    That's fine for the SNES collection—with around 80 titles crammed into a barely-noticeable 267 MB bundle, who cares if there’s a bunch you'll never play? Yet with just four titles presently available (F-Zero, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, SoulCalibur II, and Super Mario Strikers), NSO GameCube is already a 6-GB commitment. Original GameCube discs could hold just shy of 1.5 GB, so each addition is going to see that launcher demand ever more space, and each unwanted game could prevent you from installing something else you want to play. While this only affects NSO subscribers who use the GameCube library, the freedom to choose which GameCube games get installed would be a huge help.

    The Problem With the Solution

    Image may contain: Computer Hardware, Electronics, Hardware, and Text
    Courtesy of Amazon

    SanDisk

    MicroSD Express (256 GB)

    The good news is that Switch 2 still allows users to expand storage via microSD cards. Problem solved—just whack a massive capacity card in, right? Not quite. Switch 2 only supports microSD Express format cards. There's good reason for this—the new standard offers much faster data read and write speeds, allowing games to load faster—but the rule causes problems.

    One is cost. MicroSD Express cards cost more per GB of storage than their predecessors. At the time of writing, a SanDisk 128 GB card is $17, while its Switch 2-compatible microSD Express format card is $54 for the same amount of storage—a 3X premium. Another is card capacities. There are a handful of 1-terabyte microSD Express cards on the market, but supplies are vanishingly low, and prices are astronomical. Although you can technically use multiple microSD cards with your console, Nintendo advises against it, so swapping several smaller cards around isn't an option either.

    More confusingly, the SD Express format only refers to speed, not capacity, which has its own standards. Most microSD cards you're likely to buy, whether they're in the Express speed format or not, are "SD eXtended Capacity" standard, or SDXC. These can theoretically hold a maximum of 2 TB of data, though the largest legitimate card you're likely to find on sale is 1.5 TB.

    However, in 2018, the SD Association—the industry body that sets standards for SD memory cards—introduced SD Ultra Capacity, or SDUC. This supports capacities up to a staggering 128 TB, “regardless of form factor, either micro or full size, or interface type including […] SD Express.” There are no SDUC cards on the market at all yet, so we're a long, long way from being able to slap "even" an 8-TB card in your Switch 2 and install everything you could dream of. In theory, though, surely this means you'll one day be able to do just that?

    Photograph: Brad Bourque

    Again, not quite. Beyond the microSD Express requirement for speed, the Switch 2 only supports cards up to 2 TB in capacity. For now, this is a nonissue—the largest microSD Express cards on the market are half that at 1 TB, and all are in the SDXC format for storage, which maxes out at 2 TB anyway. What's less clear is whether the Switch 2 will support SDUC cards when they eventually enter the marketplace. If it does, a firmware update might lift that 2-TB cap. If not, 2 TB of SDXC is the Switch 2's ultimate storage fate. Nintendo did not respond to our request for comment.

    There are some reasons for the storage anxious to be optimistic, though. The mere existence and huge success of the Switch 2 will see more consumers demand microSD Express cards, eventually driving prices down and capacities up, at least to the SDXC standard's 2-TB limit. For most players, that amount of storage is realistically enough for all but the most covetous data hoarders. Consumer backlash could also push more third-party publishers into releasing their physical games on cartridges, rather than as Game-Key Cards, reducing storage demands.

    Even simpler, if Nintendo provided more control to the user—choosing which GameCube games to install or officially supporting swapping microSD cards—players themselves could easily manage their digital collections. In the meantime, as Switch 2 digital libraries grow, there's only one option: getting used to juggling installs for the foreseeable future.

    19 Best Barefoot Shoes for Running or Walking (2025), Tested and Reviewed

    by: Scott Gilbertson

    Our favorite zero-drop, minimalist footwear will let you feel the ground beneath your feet.

    The Best Barefoot Shoes for Walking or Running

    Our favorite zero-drop, minimalist footwear will let you feel the ground beneath your feet.
    Featured in this article
    Best Barefoot Sandals
    Xero Shoes Z-Trail
    Read more
    Best Barefoot Running Shoes
    Merrell Vapor Glove 6
    Read more
    The Best All-Weather Running Shoe
    Vivobarefoot Primus Trail III All Weather FG
    Read more
    Best Shoe for Minimalists
    Vivobarefoot Sensus Shoe
    Read more
    Show more
    4 / 19

    FAQs

    How do you define a barefoot shoe?

    Readers often ask why we don't include Altra or other zero-drop shoes. The answer has to do with how thick the sole is. Our definition of a barefoot shoe is that it should have a thin sole, or stack height as this is sometimes called. I put the cutoff at 10 mm or less (ideally less) to allow for good ground feel and toe splay, and to give you the kinds of feedback your foot needs to maintain natural movement.

    That said, there are some categories where this doesn't always make sense. WIRED readers asked about heavier, work-boot style shoes, so we now include Lems boots. They have a 13-mm sole, but no arch. Splitting hairs over definitions does more harm than help to the barefoot community in my opinion. Zero-drop shoes are a huge step up from high-arch, super-padded running shoes, and if that's where you want to start, that's great.

    How do I get started with barefoot shoes?

    You've probably been wearing padded shoes most of your life. Don't expect to toss them and be able to do the same mileage—whether walking or running—in barefoot shoes. To a certain degree, you must relearn how to run and walk. It's going to take a conscious effort on your part, and it can be very difficult. You're not just learning, you're also unlearning some ingrained habits. The key is to go slow. Very, very, absurdly slow.

    How you approach barefoot shoes depends on what you're looking to do. I happened to be getting into running, which worked out nicely because I had to take it slow (I sucked). If you're currently an ultra-marathoner and want to try barefoot shoes, you'll have a hard time holding yourself back. If you're somewhere between those poles, it'll still be hard not to overdo it. Focus the discipline you usually use for distance into not doing distance.

    If you don't know where to start, check out Graham Tuttle's YouTube channel, especially his foot strengthening exercises. These will help you develop the foot and ankle strength you lack if you're coming from years of padded shoes, and help reduce muscle soreness when you're getting started in barefoot running. Tuttle also offers some paid programs aimed at giving you a more personalized guide (I have not tried any of these). Another YouTube channel I've found helpful is the MovNat channel, which isn't barefoot-specific but has plenty of good barefoot advice sprinkled throughout its content. And if you haven't read Christopher McDougall, both Born to Run and Natural Born Heroes are fun barefoot-related reads. Indeed, Born to Run arguably did more to popularize barefoot running than anything else since the padded shoe was born in the early 1970s.

    It's also worth saying that barefoot shoes are not a zero-sum game. For over a year I wore barefoot shoes running, regular shoes for other tasks, and sandals the rest of the time. It's not all or nothing. If you go on a barefoot run and then slap on your favorite Converse right after, that's OK. It's equally important to know that everyone is different. It took me six months to fully transition to barefoot shoes. But that's just me. It might take you two months or two years. Go at your own pace, and don't worry about the experiences of others.

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    What Happens to Your Data If You Stop Paying for Cloud Storage?

    by: David Nield

    Hit by subscription fatigue? Here’s what happens to your files and photos if you cancel your paid storage plan.

    What Happens to Your Data If You Stop Paying for Cloud Storage?

    Hit by subscription fatigue? Here’s what happens to your files and photos if you cancel your paid storage plan.
    Image may contain Outdoors Nature and Sky
    Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff/Getty Images

    If it's been a while since you added up how many digital subscriptions you're paying for, it's likely to be more than you think: streaming services, software packages, games, AI bots, health and fitness wearables ... the list goes on.

    You can add cloud storage subscriptions to that list too. Apple, Google, and Microsoft offer very little in the way of free storage in the cloud, which means if you want the convenience of having your photos, videos, and other files safely backed up and accessible on every device, you're probably going to have to pay for it.

    What if you don't want to have these subscriptions for life, though—what if you've found a better option for your backups and storage (and there are plenty of options out there)? You might be wondering what happens to the years and years of files you've amassed in the cloud if you cancel your storage subscription.

    While we can't cover every single cloud storage service here, we've picked four of the main ones below. Here's what happens to your data if you stop paying, and what you need to do with your files before hitting the unsubscribe button.

    Apple iCloud

    You can manage your iCloud subscription from any Apple device.

    David Nield

    Pricing for Apple iCloud storage starts at $0.99 per month for 50 GB of space, and you get extras like Hide My Email included too. You can manage your subscription from your iPhone by going to Settings, tapping your name and then Subscriptions, and from System Settings on a Mac by selecting your name, then iCloud.

    If you cancel your iCloud storage, you go back down to the free allocation of 5 GB. If you currently have more than that in the cloud, you won't be able to make new backups or sync any new files until you've freed up some space—so you'll need to delete files to add any new ones.

    What Apple is less clear about is what will happen to your existing data. The official documentation implies, but doesn't specifically say, that your files will be kept in a read-only state, with no backups completing until you delete files or increase your storage plan. The iCloud terms and conditions state that if you've not backed up a device for 180 days, Apple “reserves the right” to delete any existing backups (including photos and videos)—so it may delete your files, and it may not.

    Given this timeline, it's unlikely that anything will happen to your files immediately after you cancel, though we'd recommend getting your iCloud files backed up somewhere else as soon as possible—bearing in mind that any local copies of this data you have won't be affected by canceling your iCloud storage plan.

    Google One

    Google Takeout lets you download everything in your Google storage.

    David Nield

    If you pay Google for cloud storage, your pricing options start at $1.99 per month, which gets you 100 GB of space in the cloud. As with Apple, there are extras attached, and you can manage your current plan via the Google One dashboard on the web.

    Choose to unsubscribe from your Google One package, and you go back down to 15 GB of storage space, across Gmail, Google Photos, Google Drive, and Google's other apps. For all the time you're over that limit, those apps will essentially freeze—as in, you won't be able to send or receive emails in Gmail or create new files in Google Docs.

    You won't be able to sync new files to Google Photos or Google Drive, either. Google says if you stay over the free storage limit without paying, “all the content that counts toward your storage quota may be deleted”—so as with Apple, there's a “may” in there.

    Your files are safe from this fate for two years after canceling, but unless you want your Gmail and other Google apps to become pretty much unusable, you'll need to free up some space or back up your files somewhere else. Thankfully, you can download everything from your Google cloud storage quite simply, via Google Takeout.

    Microsoft OneDrive

    OneDrive is tightly integrated into Windows.

    David Nield

    As with Apple and Google, Microsoft OneDrive storage comes with bonus goodies included, not least Microsoft Office at the higher storage tiers. The most basic one, which gives you 100 GB of room, will set you back $1.99 a month.

    You get 5 GB of OneDrive cloud storage space for free with a Microsoft account, and if you cancel your subscription, that's what you go back to. As per Microsoft, as long as you're over that limit and not paying, you won't be able to sync any new files. Existing files will remain, but in a read-only state. You also won't be able to send or receive emails in Outlook.com, or Teams messages with attachments.

    Microsoft gives you six months to decide what to do with the files in your OneDrive account, after which it “may” (there's that word again) decide to delete the files you have on Microsoft's servers. Once they're deleted, Microsoft warns, they’re gone forever. If you need these files, you need to download them and move them somewhere else (the OneDrive clients for Windows and macOS can help here).

    Unlike Google, Microsoft treats its cloud storage and email storage services separately. You get 15 GB of cloud space with Outlook for free, and 100 GB of space if you pay $1.99 a month (on top of the other 100 GB). You can't send or receive email if you are over your limit, so you'll need to clean up your inbox to start using it again.

    Dropbox

    You can sync your Dropbox files to Windows or macOS using the desktop clients.

    David Nield

    We can't cover every single cloud storage service in this article, but here's one more: Dropbox. Dropbox users get 2 GB of storage space in the cloud free of charge, and then the paid plans begin at $9.99 per month for 2 TB of space.

    If you store more than 2 GB of files in your Dropbox, and then stop paying, nothing happens to those files: They will just stay as they are, in the cloud, and on your synced devices. However, you won't be able to add new files, and any changes you make locally to files won't then be synced to the cloud.

    There's no expiration date on your files either—they'll just stay as they are permanently. Presumably Dropbox wants to encourage users to sign up for another paid plan somewhere down the line, at which point you can pick up where you left off.

    You can use the Dropbox clients for Windows and macOS to sync files from the cloud to your computers, and from there to other locations and backup services. Once files are moved out of or deleted from your Dropbox folder on your computer, they'll be wiped from the cloud too.

    Efforts to Ground Physics in Math Are Opening the Secrets of Time

    by: Leila Sloman

    By proving how individual molecules create the complex motion of fluids, three mathematicians have illuminated why time can’t flow in reverse.

    Efforts to Ground Physics in Math Are Opening the Secrets of Time

    By proving how individual molecules create the complex motion of fluids, three mathematicians have illuminated why time can’t flow in reverse.
    Image may contain Nature Outdoors Sea Water Animal Bird Penguin Child Person Cartoon Leisure Activities and Sport
    Illustration: Wei-An Jin/Quanta Magazine

    The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

    At the turn of the 20th century, the renowned mathematician David Hilbert had a grand ambition to bring a more rigorous, mathematical way of thinking into the world of physics. At the time, physicists were still plagued by debates about basic definitions—what is heat? how are molecules structured?—and Hilbert hoped that the formal logic of mathematics could provide guidance.

    On the morning of August 8, 1900, he delivered a list of 23 key math problems to the International Congress of Mathematicians. Number six: Produce airtight proofs of the laws of physics.

    The scope of Hilbert’s sixth problem was enormous. He asked “to treat in the same manner [as geometry], by means of axioms, those physical sciences in which mathematics plays an important part.”

    His challenge to axiomatize physics was “really a program,” said Dave Levermore, a mathematician at the University of Maryland. “The way the sixth problem is actually stated, it’s never going to be solved.”

    But Hilbert provided a starting point. To study different properties of a gas—say, the speed of its molecules, or its average temperature—physicists use different equations. In particular, they use one set of equations to describe how individual molecules in a gas move, and another to describe the behavior of the gas as a whole. Was it possible, Hilbert wondered, to show that one set of equations implied the other—that these equations were, as physicists had assumed but hadn’t rigorously proved, simply different ways of modeling the same reality?

    For 125 years, even axiomatizing this small corner of physics seemed impossible. Mathematicians made partial progress, coming up with proofs that only worked when they considered the behavior of gases on extremely short timescales or in other contrived situations. But these fell short of the kind of result that Hilbert had imagined.

    In 1900, David Hilbert came up with a list of 23 problems to guide the next century of mathematical research. His sixth problem challenged mathematicians to axiomatize physics.

    Photograph: University of Gottingen

    Now, three mathematicians have finally provided such a result. Their work not only represents a major advance in Hilbert’s program, but also taps into questions about the irreversible nature of time.

    “It’s a beautiful work,” said Gregory Falkovich, a physicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. “A tour de force.”

    Under the Mesoscope

    Consider a gas whose particles are very spread out. There are many ways a physicist might model it.

    At a microscopic level, the gas is composed of individual molecules that act like billiard balls, moving through space according to Isaac Newton’s 350-year-old laws of motion. This model of the gas’s behavior is called the hard-sphere particle system.

    Now zoom out a bit. At this new “mesoscopic” scale, your field of vision encompasses too many molecules to individually track. Instead, you’ll model the gas using an equation that the physicists James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann developed in the late 19th century. Called the Boltzmann equation, it describes the likely behavior of the gas’s molecules, telling you how many particles you can expect to find at different locations moving at different speeds. This model of the gas lets physicists study how air moves at small scales—for instance, how it might flow around a space shuttle.

    Zoom out again, and you can no longer tell that the gas is made up of individual particles. It acts like one continuous substance. To model this macroscopic behavior—how dense the gas is and how fast it’s moving at any point in space—you’ll need yet another set of equations, called the Navier-Stokes equations.

    Physicists view these three different models of the gas’s behavior as compatible; they’re simply different lenses for understanding the same thing. But mathematicians hoping to contribute to Hilbert’s sixth problem wanted to prove that rigorously. They needed to show that Newton’s model of individual particles gives rise to Boltzmann’s statistical description, and that Boltzmann’s equation in turn gives rise to the Navier-Stokes equations.

    Mathematicians have had some success with the second step, proving that it’s possible to derive a macroscopic model of a gas from a mesoscopic one in various settings. But they couldn’t resolve the first step, leaving the chain of logic incomplete.

    Now that’s changed. In a series of papers, the mathematicians Yu Deng, Zaher Hani, and Xiao Ma proved the harder microscopic-to-mesoscopic step for a gas in one of these settings, completing the chain for the first time. The result and the techniques that made it possible are “paradigm-shifting,” said Yan Guo of Brown University.

    Yu Deng usually studies the behavior of systems of waves. But by applying his expertise to the realm of particles, he has now resolved a major open problem in mathematical physics.

    Photograph: Courtesy of Yu Deng

    Declaration of Independence

    Boltzmann could already show that Newton’s laws of motion give rise to his mesoscopic equation, so long as one crucial assumption holds true: that the particles in the gas move more or less independently of each other. That is, it must be very rare for a particular pair of molecules to collide with each other multiple times.

    But Boltzmann could not definitively demonstrate that this assumption was true. “What he could not do, of course, is prove theorems about this,” said Sergio Simonella of Sapienza University in Rome. “There was no structure, there were no tools at the time.”

    The physicist Ludwig Boltzmann studied the statistical properties of fluids.

    ullstein bild Dtl./Getty Images

    After all, there are infinitely many ways a collection of particles might collide and recollide. “You just get this huge explosion of possible directions that they can go,” Levermore said—making it a “nightmare” to actually prove that scenarios involving many recollisions are as rare as Boltzmann needed them to be.

    In 1975, a mathematician named Oscar Lanford managed to prove this, but only for extremely short time periods. (The exact amount of time depends on the initial state of the gas, but it’s less than the blink of an eye, according to Simonella.) Then the proof broke down; before most of the particles got the chance to collide even once, Lanford could no longer guarantee that recollisions would remain a rare occurrence.

    In the decades since, many mathematicians tried to extend his result, to no avail.

    Then, in November 2023, Deng, now at the University of Chicago, and Hani, of the University of Michigan, posted a preprint that teased the desired proof. A forthcoming paper, they wrote, would build off their latest result to investigate “the long-time extension of Lanford’s theorem.”

    Other mathematicians didn’t know what to make of the announcement. “I didn’t think it was possible,” said Pierre Germain of Imperial College London. Deng and Hani didn’t even usually work with particle systems; until that point, they’d mainly been studying systems made up of waves (like rays of light).

    So mathematicians eagerly awaited the promised proof.

    When Particles Collide

    Deng and Hani’s 2023 result involved an analysis of the transition from the microscopic scale to the mesoscopic scale in the context of waves. About a year before the mathematicians posted their paper online, Deng was at a conference, where he met with a graduate student at Princeton University named Xiao Ma. They ended up discussing Deng and Hani’s work, and how they might adapt the methods to particles. Doing so would allow them to extend Lanford’s result—to show that particle recollisions are rare even on longer timescales.

    It was an idea that Deng and Hani had already been considering. Impressed by Ma’s insights on the topic, Deng invited him to help them turn their intuition into a proof.

    The trio hoped to focus on a much-studied scenario where mathematicians had already proved the second, meso-to-macro step in Hilbert’s sixth problem. In this scenario, a dilute gas of spherical particles is trapped in a box. If a particle hits one of the box’s walls, it reappears on the opposite wall.

    But to prove the harder micro-to-meso step for this setting—thereby resolving Hilbert’s sixth problem—Deng, Hani, and Ma had to port their wave-based techniques over to particles. So they started in a setting where that task would be a little bit easier. They worked with a gas whose particles are distributed randomly in an infinite amount of space; unlike the particles in the boxed gas, which keep bouncing off each other forever, these particles eventually disperse and stop colliding. “In the whole-space case, there is a shortcut,” Deng said.

    Illustration: Wei-An Jin/Quanta Magazine

    The three mathematicians first needed to tabulate the different patterns of collisions that might occur in their gas, and how likely each of those patterns was. They could easily rule out scenarios with particularly high rates of recollisions. This left them with a finite, though still massive, number of patterns to analyze—each involving a certain subset of particles colliding, in a certain order. Once they knew exactly what each pattern entailed, they could use that information to estimate its likelihood of occurring.

    But that often felt like an impossible task, because many of the patterns involved huge numbers of particles and intricate, indirect interactions between them. “The structure of these sets [of colliding particles] gets exceedingly complicated,” Deng said. In principle, the mathematicians would need to keep track of every one of these particles simultaneously to compute the probability estimates they needed.

    That’s where Deng and Hani’s previous work on waves gave them an important insight. In that result, they’d figured out ways to break up complicated patterns of interacting waves into simpler ones. They’d carefully crafted their technique so that, by working with only a few waves at a time, they could still get a good estimate for the likelihood of the more complicated complete wave pattern.

    They hoped the same idea would work in the particle setting.

    But after a collision, particles behave very differently from waves. For instance, particles, unlike waves, bounce off each other, greatly affecting the resulting pattern of collisions and its probability of happening. Deng, Hani and Ma needed to rework the details of their strategy from the beginning.

    Zaher Hani studies solutions to equations that arise in oceanography, plasma physics, and quantum mechanics.

    Photograph: Courtesy of Zaher Hani

    First, they tackled the simplest cases, in which each particle collides just a few times over a very short time span, with no recollisions. They then gradually moved on to harder and harder cases—longer amounts of time, with more collisions and recollisions.

    It was as much an art as a science. “The intuition was developed gradually, starting with some unsuccessful attempts,” Deng said. They had to get a sense for how to slice up large, complicated patterns of particle collisions in a way that would simplify their calculations while keeping their estimates highly accurate.

    “This is a process that takes months,” Hani said. “We would be stuck constantly.” Nearly every day, they jumped on a Zoom meeting to talk things through. “Much to the dismay of my wife, some of them happened very late at night, or very early in the morning,” Hani said. “I would put my daughter to sleep, and then we would have two or three hours of Zoom meetings.”

    Finally, by the spring of 2024, the trio was sure they had covered everything. Their proof, which they posted online that summer, confirmed that recollisions had to be very, very uncommon. They’d shown, as they’d hoped to, that in their infinite-space setting, Boltzmann’s description of the gas could be derived from Newton’s. The microscopic and mesoscopic scales fell under a single rigorous mathematical framework.

    “I think it’s outstanding work,” said Alexandru Ionescu, a mathematician at Princeton who was also Deng’s and Ma’s doctoral adviser. “These are some of the most significant advances in many, many years.”

    They were now ready to return to the gas-in-a-box setting, where they could finally solve Hilbert’s sixth problem.

    The Completed Chain

    It didn’t take long for them to extend their result from the infinite-space setting to the boxed one. “Eighty percent of the proof is still the same in the whole-space case,” Deng said.

    In March, they posted a new paper that combined their proof with the earlier results connecting the Boltzmann equation to the Navier-Stokes equations. The logical chain was complete: They’d shown that, for a realistic model of a gas, a microscopic description of individual particles does indeed ultimately give rise to a macroscopic description of the gas’s large-scale behavior.

    The work didn’t just mark the resolution of a major case of Hilbert’s sixth problem. It also provided a rigorous mathematical resolution of an old paradox.

    At the microscopic scale, where particles act like billiard balls, time is reversible. Newton’s equations predict both where a particle comes from and where it’s going. The future is not fundamentally different from the past.

    But at the mesoscopic and macroscopic levels, there is no going back in time. “We know very well that, going forward in time, one ages but does not rejuvenate; heat does not spontaneously pass from a cold body to a warm body; a drop of ink in a glass of water spreads, darkening the liquid, but does not spontaneously return to the small, round shape it originally had,” Simonella wrote. Neither the Boltzmann equation nor the Navier-Stokes equations are time-reversible; if you try to run time backward, the results will be nonsensical.

    To Boltzmann’s contemporaries, this was perplexing. How could a time-irreversible equation be derived from a time-reversible system?

    But Boltzmann argued that there was no paradox: Even if each particle can be modeled in a time-reversible way, almost every collision pattern ends up with a gas dispersing. The chance of, say, a gas suddenly contracting is essentially zero.

    Lanford had confirmed this intuition mathematically for his very short time frame. Now Deng, Hani, and Ma’s result confirms it for more realistic situations.

    Going forward, mathematicians—who are still poring over the details of the new proof—want to test whether similar techniques might be useful in other, even more realistic contexts. These might include gases made up of particles of different shapes, or particles that interact in more complicated ways.

    Meanwhile, Falkovich said, these sorts of rigorous proofs can help physicists understand why a gas behaves a certain way at various scales, and why different models might be more or less effective in different scenarios. “What mathematicians do to physicists,” he said, “is they wake us up.”

    Editor’s Note: Deng and Hani’s work on the system of waves was funded in part by the Simons Foundation, which also funds the editorially independent Quanta magazine.

    12 Best Outdoor Security Cameras (2025): Battery-Powered, LTE, No Subscription

    by: Simon Hill

    These weatherproof outdoor security cams keep a watchful eye on your property while you get on with life. Our list includes battery-powered and LTE devices and cameras that need no subscription.

    The Best Outdoor Security Cameras

    These weatherproof outdoor security cams keep a watchful eye on your property while you get on with life. Our list includes battery-powered and LTE devices and cameras that need no subscription.

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    Featured in this article
    Best Outdoor Security Camera
    Arlo Pro 5 (Battery)
    Read more
    Best Value
    TP-Link Tapo Wire-Free MagCam (Battery)
    Read more
    Best Upgrade (For Local Video)
    Eufy EufyCam S3 Pro (Battery)
    Read more
    Best Hardwired Outdoor Security Camera
    TP-Link Tapo C325WB
    Read more
    Show more
    4 / 12

    Compare These Security Cameras

    Compare camerasPrice (MSRP)Video QualityRecordingAudioSmart Home
    Best Overall: Arlo Pro 5$1802K, 24 fpsCloud-onlyTwo-way audio, SirenAmazon Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, IFTTT
    Best Value: TP-Link Tapo MagCam$902K, 30 fpsLocal microSD card (up to 512 GB) or cloudTwo-way audio, SirenAmazon Alexa, Google Home
    Best Upgrade: Eufy S3 Pro$5504K, 15 fpsLocal on HomeBase S380 or cloudTwo-way audio, SirenAmazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomeKit
    Best Hardwired: TP-Link Tapo C325WB$832K, 20 fpsLocal microSD card (up to 512 GB) or cloudTwo-way audio, SirenAmazon Alexa, Google Home
    Best Pan/Tilt: Eufy SoloCam S340$2003K, 15 fpsLocal on 8 GB built-in storage, HomeBase S380, or cloudTwo-way audio, SirenAmazon Alexa, Google Home
    Best Hardwired Pan/Tilt: Ezviz H8 Pro$1502K, 15 fpsLocal microSD card (up to 512 GB) or cloudTwo-way audio, SirenAmazon Alexa, Google Home
    Best for Google: Google Nest Cam Outdoor$1801080p, 30 fpsCloud-onlyTwo-way audioGoogle Home
    Best Continuous Pan/Tilt: Reolink Altas PT Ultra$1804K, 15 fpsLocal microSD card (up to 512 GB), Reolink Home Hub, or cloudTwo-way audio, SirenAmazon Alexa, Google Home
    Best Wide Angle: Reolink Argus 4 Pro$1504K (2K + 2K), 15 fpsLocal microSD card (up to 512 GB), Reolink Home Hub, or cloudTwo-way audio, SirenAmazon Alexa, Google Home
    Best LTE: Arlo Go 2$2501080p, 24 fpsLocal microSD card (up to 2 TB) or cloudTwo-way audio, SirenAmazon Alexa, Google Home, IFTTT
    Best Floodlight: Eufy Floodlight Cam E340$2193K and 2K, 15 fpsLocal microSD card (up to 128 GB), HomeBase S380, or cloudTwo-way audio, SirenAmazon Alexa, Google Home
    Best for Matter: Aqara Hub G5 Pro$1802K (1080p with HomeKit), 20 fpsLocal (8 GB internal), NAS (RTSP, SMB), or cloudTwo-way audioAmazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomeKit, Home Assistant, Samsung SmartThings
    Best for Alexa: Ring Spotlight Cam Pro$2301080p, 30 fpsCloud-onlyTwo-way audio, SirenAmazon Alexa

    Best MicroSD Cards

    Photograph: Amazon

    Some security cameras support local storage, enabling you to record videos on the camera or a linked hub. A few hubs have built-in storage, and some provide slots for hard drives, but most rely on microSD cards. This is a quick guide on what to look for (plus some recommendations).

    The microSD card you choose should have fast read and write speeds so you can record high-quality video and play it back without delay. I recommend going for Class 10 microSD cards rated as U1 or U3. You can dive deeper into what that means in our SD card explainer. Before you buy, check the card type, format, and maximum supported card size for your security camera. Consider how many hours of video each card capacity can store. For example, you might get a couple of days of HD video on a 32-GB card. If you want to record continuously, you likely want a higher-capacity card.

    I recommend formatting the card as soon as you insert it into the camera. You will usually be prompted to do this, but if not, there is generally an option in the settings. Just remember, formatting will wipe anything on the microSD card, so back up the contents first.

    Some security camera manufacturers offer their own branded microSD cards. They work just fine, but for maximum reliability, I’d suggest one of the following options. Remember to always check the specs. Even different sizes of cards in the same range often have different capabilities.

    Other Good Outdoor Security Cameras

    I've tested several other outdoor security cameras. These are the ones I like, but they just missed out on a place above.

    Photograph: Simon Hill

    TP-Link Tapo C660 for $170: I was excited to try TP-Link’s new line of Tapo cameras, and the C660 immediately jumped out with some compelling features. Offering 4K footage, 360-degree pan and 90-degree tilt, a 10,000-mAh battery, a sizable solar panel, and local storage on a microSD card, the C660 is a solid choice for hard-to-reach areas. To sweeten the deal, it has on-device AI detection and dual-band Wi-Fi support, and it can record continuously at 1 fps (you can up the capture interval to every 5, 10, 20, 30, or 60 seconds). Sadly, I found the tracking was flaky, moving subjects at night often appeared blurry (the frame rate is 15 to 20 fps), and the sound was tinny and echoey. The camera has to be mounted quite high, as it’s angled down, and I have concerns about continuous recording and battery life in the winter. It handled a router change without issue, staying connected, and despite a few false positives the AI detection works well, and the app loads swiftly. For some folks, it may be a better option than our pan/tilt recommendations above.

    TP-Link Tapo HybridCam Duo C246D for $70: Undeniably great value, this dual-lens pan/tilt camera from TP-Link is worth a look. The versatile design allows for indoor or outdoor use, and you can sit the camera on a table or shelf or mount it the other way round using the supplied bracket. The only complication for outdoor use is the need to run the USB-C power cable to an outlet. There’s a 2K fixed lens with a 130-degree field of view and a second 2K telephoto lens that can pan 360 degrees and tilt 135 degrees. You can insert a microSD card if you want to record locally, and there’s on-device AI detection that works pretty well (I did get the odd false positive). The automatic tracking is quite good but not perfect, especially at night. Fast-moving subjects can appear blurry, and the frame rate maxes out at 15.

    Photograph: Simon Hill

    Swann MaxRanger 4K 2-Camera Kit for $369: This kit was very easy to set up, as the cameras come paired with the hub, so you just need to plug the hub into your router. The 4K video is crisp and clear with vibrant colors, and the cameras worked well day or night. The main selling point is range, and I was able to put a camera at the bottom of my garden, which is too far away for most security cameras to work well. I also love that you can see multiple feeds simultaneously in the app, and the hub has a backup battery, just in case the power goes out. But the solar panels on top of these cameras don’t seem to work well, and one of the cameras drained quite quickly, even with ample sunlight. I also had to turn off and reconnect the system after changing my router, despite having the same network name and details. While it was generally quick, the feed sometimes took a while and, on one occasion, completely refused to load, so I have concerns about consistency.

    Imilab EC6 Panorama for $100: This interesting and affordable camera combines a 180-degree view created by stitching two lenses together, like the Reolink Argus 4 Pro above, with pan (344 degrees) and tilt (90 degrees) functionality to give an expansive view that might usually require multiple cameras. It’s large and designed to sit under your eaves, but you will also have to run a power cable, as there’s no battery. You get decent 3.5K quality footage and infrared night vision. It works with Xiaomi’s Home app, and you can record locally on a microSD card. There is on-device AI detection for people and vehicles, and the camera can automatically track subjects, though it doesn’t always work well, especially at night. Daytime footage is also much better than nighttime, even with the spotlight to enable color capture.

    Eufy Security Solar Wall Light Cam S120 for $100: In the right spot, this weather-resistant security camera and motion-activated light from Eufy is an excellent set-and-forget device. It records 2K video on 8 GB of built-in storage, has a 300-lumen, motion-activated light, and a solar panel to keep it charged up (it needs two hours of sunlight a day to stay charged). The camera is not Eufy's best, as it's limited to a 120-degree field of view, it doesn't have HDR, and the frame rate is only 15 fps. The footage is reasonably crisp when you set the resolution to 2K, and alerts come through reliably and swiftly. You can also set privacy and activity zones in the app, set detection to human-only, and tweak how the light works. The S120 has an alarm built in, offers reasonable two-way audio (though only one way at a time), and has night vision. The S120 is a little slower to load than the other Eufy cameras I recommend here, and it sometimes misses the beginning, starting the video with subjects already halfway across the frame. But as a one-off purchase, with no need for a subscription, it will suit some folks.

    Philips Hue Secure Camera for $90: Homes kitted out with Philips Hue smart lights may find its security camera range interesting. The Philips Hue Secure Wired Camera (7/10, WIRED Recommends) and the Philips Hue Secure Battery Camera ($160) are quick and easy to add to the Hue app, offer crisp 1080p video, and are both weatherproof, with an IP65 rating. They offer a fairly expansive 140-degree field of view, two-way audio, and a siren, and are quick to send motion alerts. The live feed loads swiftly in the Hue app. But, to get the most from them, you need to subscribe for $4 per month ($40/year) for a single camera, which gives you 30 days of cloud storage and unlocks smart detection features. You can set up privacy and activity zones, and filter by person, animal, vehicle, and package. The AI performed well for me, and all video is end-to-end encrypted (there’s no local storage option). If you have a Hue Bridge, you can have the cameras trigger your indoor or outdoor lighting. I set up the Battery Camera to trigger a Discover Outdoor Floodlight ($180), and it works great (no more stubbed toes when I take the trash out after night has fallen). The Battery camera drained by only 12 percent in the first two weeks (on course for between three and four months), but then it seemed to die overnight. I have since recharged (which took more than eight hours), and it seems to be working normally. Ultimately, the wired camera works better, but both are unreliable when it comes to alerts, sometimes missing events that other cameras caught, so they're only worth considering for Hue fans.

    Photograph: Simon Hill

    Baseus Security S1 Pro for $180: This camera kit from Baseus includes two outdoor security cameras with solar panels on top and a 16-GB local storage hub for inside (expandable via SSD up to 16 TB). Each camera has two lenses (a regular wide-angle and a telephoto for close-ups), which is an interesting idea but requires careful placement. The footage is good at up to 3K but only 15 fps, and there’s no color night vision without the spotlight. The cameras can’t move, but the solar panels on top can rotate to catch more rays. While mine stayed topped up, this feels a bit gimmicky. There is human and vehicle detection, but I got several false positives (cats flagged as humans), and it sometimes alerted me, but failed to record video clips. The two-way audio is good. While this system doesn’t match the EufyCam S3 Pro above, it is cheaper.

    Aosu 4K Solar for $150: I’m always a little wary about new brands, but my first impressions of this 4K outdoor security camera were good. It’s a solid package with a built-in solar panel to keep the battery charged. The feed loads quickly, the app alerts correctly for humans and vehicles (the animal detection isn’t so effective), and the camera offers two-way audio. Sadly, the video frame rate is low, and there’s no HDR. The color night vision is also a bit ropey. You can record locally on a microSD card or subscribe to Aosu’s cloud for $4.49 monthly.

    Reolink Duo 3 PoE for $180 or Duo 3 Wi-Fi for $190: Most folks seeking a dual-lens camera that stitches together for a 180-degree view should opt for the Reolink Argus 4 Pro listed above, but if you can run an Ethernet or power cable, you could save some money with the Duo 3. It also offers a higher resolution than the Argus, but it only has color night vision with a spotlight. The Wi-Fi version only needs a power cable, but annoyingly, you do have to plug in via Ethernet during the initial setup. Both versions work well and use the same app as the Reolink cameras above.

    Annke NightChroma NCD800 for $300: Probably best suited for a small business, this PoE dual-lens camera offers clear 4K footage and color night vision. It stitches the two images to give you a complete 180-degree view. There is built-in AI human and vehicle detection, and Annke claims it can learn to disregard waving branches, raindrops, and other false positives. There’s a spotlight that can strobe along with the siren sounding to scare intruders away, decent two-way audio, and local recording via NVR, NAS, or microSD card. Setup is tricky, and you need to run an Ethernet cable to the camera as there’s no battery or Wi-Fi.

    Logitech Circle View for $160: There are some big caveats to this camera, including the permanently attached 10-foot power cord that's not weatherproof, the need for a HomeKit hub, such as HomePod Mini or Apple TV, and zero compatibility with Android. If none of that fazes you, then it's a solid outdoor camera for privacy-minded folks. It doesn't have a separate app of its own; you add it directly in Apple's Home app by scanning a QR code. It captures Full HD video and boasts an extremely wide 180-degree field of view, though there's a bit of a fish-eye effect here. (The lack of HDR also means areas are sometimes too dark or blown out.) There's motion detection, two-way audio, and decent night vision, and you can ask Siri to display the live feed, which loads quickly.

    Annke C800 for $66: This is a solid PoE (Power-over-Ethernet) camera that supports the Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) and Open Network Video Interface Forum (ONVIF), making it a good choice for folks with a network video recorder (NVR), though it also has a microSD card (up to 512 GB) slot for local recording. The footage is crisp at up to 4K with a 123-degree field of view, and there’s color night vision, with black-and-white and a spotlight as backups. Installation may be tricky as you must run an Ethernet cable, but that means no worries about power and no Wi-Fi woes. I tested the turret version, but this camera also comes in a dome or bullet shape. The motion detection is quite good, with minimal false positives, and the camera recognizes humans and vehicles reasonably accurately. Annke’s software is a bit clunky, though.

    Photograph: Simon Hill

    Safemo Set P1 (2-Pack) for $190: I love the idea of a simple kit like this, where you just plug the hub in, connect it to your router, and install the pre-paired cameras. Each has an optional solar panel to keep the battery charged. The Safemo app is well-designed, video goes up to 4K, and this entirely local system boasts 32 GB of storage (expandable up to 4 TB). It even has locally processed person, vehicle, pet, and package detection. The person detection was mostly accurate (it occasionally flagged my cat), and the vehicle detection flagged my robot lawnmower (close enough) and an inflatable donut that blew across the backyard, but false positives were rare. What prevents me from wholeheartedly recommending this impressive debut is the lack of 2FA (Safemo says it is coming) and connectivity issues, where one of the cameras would occasionally disconnect from the hub and be inaccessible in the app. This always righted itself without me moving anything, but worryingly, it happened a few times. If you plan to up the resolution to 4K from the default SD, you will need fast internet, especially to view the live feed, which I found was choppy and pixelated at 4K, though recorded videos were sharp and detailed.

    Imilab EC6 Dual 2K WiFi Plug-in Spotlight Camera for $80: With dual 2K lenses, this security camera can cover a fixed spot and simultaneously track a subject. The bottom camera offers pan/tilt controls. It works via the Xiaomi Home app, making it an easier sell if you already have a Xiaomi phone or other gadgets from the Chinese brand. You can insert a microSD card for local storage or subscribe for cloud storage. The person detection and tracking worked well in my tests. The video was mostly crisp, but movement was sometimes a bit jerky, and fast-moving subjects can get blurry. It does have WDR but could use HDR to prevent bright areas from blowing out.

    Arlo Essential Wireless Security Camera for $50: This is the most affordable way to try Arlo’s wares, and it’s a solid security camera. Setup is a breeze, the 1080p footage is clear, and the rich notifications are the best, but you need an Arlo Secure subscription ($10 per month or $96 a year for a single camera, $20 per month or $216 a year for unlimited cameras). Compared to our top pick, the Essential has a narrower field of view and lacks HDR, so it loses details in bright and dark areas. I also tried the Essential XL ($100), which is the same camera with a much larger battery (4x longer-lasting).

    Ezviz H3C for $60: I had issues setting this wired camera up because it can only connect to 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi, but once up and running, it proved a decent performer. The Ezviz app has 2FA and allows fingerprint unlock, which is handy. There’s also onboard AI for person detection, a spotlight, black-and-white night vision, and two-way audio, though it's laggy and poor quality. The video quality is decent at up to 2K, and the live feed is fast to load. All in all, it’s not bad for the money. I also tested the Ezviz EB8 4G, which is quite similar to the H8 Pro I recommend above, except it can connect to 4G mobile networks—this means it doesn’t require Wi-Fi, though you will need a SIM card and cell service plan.

    Imou Knight Spotlight Camera for $180: A smart design and solid feature set make this an attractive security camera for the right spot. It can record at up to 4K with HDR, has a 600-lumen spotlight around the lens, and can take microSD cards up to 256 GB (sold separately) to record locally. The app offers a wide range of features, including detection zones, cross-line alerts, and human or pet detection, though the AI sometimes gets it wrong. Sadly, the low frame rate (15 fps) too often results in blurry footage, but this came close to snagging a spot above.

    Reolink Go PT Ultra for $230: If you need a wireless security camera that can connect to cellular 3G or 4G LTE networks, you could do worse than this offering from Reolink. It's a pan-and-tilt camera that can record up to 4K video on a local microSD card (sold separately), or you can subscribe for cloud storage. It has a wee spotlight and decent color night vision, and it comes with a solar panel to keep the battery topped up. The detection is reliable, but it doesn’t always categorize subjects correctly. Loading time and lag will depend on the strength of the signal. Just make sure you check carrier compatibility and get a SIM card before you buy.

    Swann AllSecure650 4 Camera Kit for $420: This kit includes four wireless, battery-powered cameras and a network video recorder (NVR) that can plug into a TV or monitor via HDMI. The cameras can record up to 2K, and footage is crisp and detailed enough to zoom in on, though there is a mild fish-eye effect. The night vision is reasonably good, but the two-way audio lags and sounds distorted. I like the option to view all camera feeds simultaneously, the backup battery in the NVR makes it a cinch to swap batteries when a camera is running low, and everything is local with no need for a subscription. Unfortunately, the mobile app is poor, camera feeds sometimes take several seconds to load, and there doesn’t seem to be any 2FA. The NVR interface is also clunky to navigate with the provided mouse.

    Arlo Pro 4 for $68: This camera was our top pick, and it is still an excellent buy that is widely available. Its successor, the Pro 5, has slightly better battery life and enhanced color night vision, but there isn't a huge difference. This camera provides crisp, clear footage; responds swiftly; and has an excellent detection and notification system, but you must also factor in the cost of an Arlo subscription starting from $10 per month for a single camera.

    Reolink Argus 3 Pro for $70: There’s a lot to like with this security camera, not least the affordable price. It offers 2K video, local or cloud storage, two-way audio, a siren, and person recognition. The live feed loads fast, and it’s cheap to buy a solar panel accessory for power. The app is a little confusing, but Reolink recently added 2FA. I also tested the Reolink Argus PT with solar panel ($120), a solid pan-and-tilt camera with an otherwise similar feature set. Reolink cameras also support dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz).

    Eve Outdoor Cam for $220: This stylish floodlight camera must be wired in, and installation is tricky (you may want an electrician). It can replace an outdoor light to give you a motion-activated light (up to 1,500 lumens), 1080p video (157-degree field of view), and two-way audio. As a HomeKit camera, you will need an Apple HomeKit hub (Apple TV, HomePod, or iPad) and an iCloud+ storage plan. Sadly, the video and sound quality are average; it only works on 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi, and there’s no Android support.

    Toucan Security Light Camera for $100: You can plug this camera into an outlet, and it comes with an 8-meter waterproof cable. It has a motion-activated light (1,200 lumens), records 1080p video, and supports two-way audio. I found the footage quite detailed, but it struggled with direct sunlight. You can record locally on a microSD card (sold separately) and get 24 hours of free cloud storage, but it has limitations. Plans start from $3 per month. Even with motion detection set to the lowest sensitivity, this camera triggered too often during testing, and there’s no way to filter for people, so I got frequent false positives (blowing leaves, moths, and birds all triggered alerts).

    SimpliSafe Wireless Outdoor Security Camera for $175: A solid set of features, crisp 1080p video, and support for HDR all sound tempting, but you need a SimpliSafe security system (9/10, WIRED Recommends) and monitoring plan to make this camera worthwhile, making it too expensive for what you get. (The Arlo Pro 4 offers better-quality video and more features.) It may be a useful add-on for existing SimpliSafe customers, though.

    About Ring's Camera

    Image may contain: Person, Security, Electronics, and Camera
    Photograph: Simon Hill

    Ring

    Spotlight Cam Pro Battery

    Wired/Tired
    Wired
    • Decent spotlights
    • Accurate person detection
    • Above average two-way audio
    • Ring app is feature-packed
    Tired
    • Limited resolution
    • Requires a subscription
    • Battery life is poor

    If you already have a Ring doorbell and want to add a security camera to the backyard, it makes sense to stick with Ring to keep everything in one app. The Ring Spotlight Cam Pro Battery is our pick. It records good-quality 1080p footage at a smooth 30 frames per second with optional HDR to balance mixed lighting. The 140-degree field of view was enough to take in most of my backyard and side-path entrance. It has two motion-activated LED spotlights, a siren, and above-average two-way audio. What sets it apart from the cheaper Cam Plus is support for dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4-GHz and 5-GHz), color pre-roll (showing four seconds before an event), and Bird's Eye Zones giving you an aerial view and the ability to set a perimeter for motion triggers (very handy if your camera faces a street beyond your property). The Cam Pro was very reliable, and the person filter works well (no false positives for my cat, robot lawnmower, or washing on the line).

    Sadly, cloud storage for your videos and the best features, like person alerts and rich notifications, require a Ring Protect Plan ($5 per month for one camera or $10 per month for all your cameras and doorbells). The other weakness is battery life. I installed the Spotlight Cam Pro in a fairly busy spot with all the bells and whistles turned on, and the battery only lasted around three weeks. I like the quick-release design, but you will likely want to invest in a spare battery ($35) to swap in because they take a few hours to charge. While the Ring app is feature-packed, it’s not the fastest to load the live feed and can be a little confusing to navigate, though the in-app tutorials are great at explaining everything.

    Unfortunately, Ring seems to be rekindling its old policy, where it allowed local law enforcement to request video footage directly from Ring customers. We stopped recommending Ring cameras when this policy was active, but the company ended this practice last year. Now that it might be coming back, I encourage you to look at alternatives instead of contributing to suburban surveillance.

    Don’t Buy These Security Cameras

    I didn't like every camera I tested. These are the ones to avoid.

    Photograph: Simon Hill

    Night Owl Solar Wi-Fi Battery Camera: Offering decent 2K video, a built-in solar panel to keep the battery topped up, and local storage on a microSD card or Night Owl hub (sold separately), this seems compelling for the price. Sadly, the app is a mess, and I ran into a weird issue immediately with account creation, where I got stuck in a loop of “Account doesn’t exist,” but it wouldn’t let me sign up with another email because my phone number had been used. I got around it with fresh details, but then the camera disconnected when I changed my router (same details) without any warning, and refused to reconnect until I reset it.

    Photograph: Simon Hill

    Vosker VKX: Sometimes you need a security camera in a location without Wi-Fi, so something like the Vosker VKX with 4G LTE connectivity could be handy. With a durable design, including a built-in solar panel, my first impression was good. The camera provided regular snapshots of my chosen test area at the far end of my backyard. You can schedule the camera, and it has a built-in deterrent light, but there is no subject recognition, so any motion will trigger it (you can tweak the sensitivity). The still images looked fine, but the video was choppy, with bright areas completely blown out. Sadly, you have to change modes to record video, and my video tests failed with no explanation around half the time. You cannot stream live video from this camera, and it requires an expensive plan (starting from $10 per month). The basic plan limits you to 500 alerts and just 10 downloads. You need to upgrade to Elite at $20 a month for unlimited alerts and 40 downloads. It seems like a terrible deal when any motion can trigger an alert.

    Baseus N1 2K HD 2-Cam Kit: This kit from Baseus includes two security cameras and a base station with 16 GB of storage (expandable to 16 TB) for local recordings (no cloud option). The camera was easy to set up and sent alerts for most motion events, but the human detection was inaccurate, sometimes erroneously suggesting a human and sometimes ignoring actual people. The app is relatively barebones, and there is no 2FA. Although it does record up to 2K footage, the relatively low frame rate (15 fps) and lack of HDR can make for blurry, blown-out video. Tapping on notifications annoyingly does not load the video clip or the live view, making it slow to use. Baseus is new to security cameras, and it shows.

    Wyze Cam Outdoor V2: This was our budget camera pick, offering 1080p with a 110-degree field of view. It comes with a base station that takes a microSD card (not included) for local video recording. If you prefer the cloud, you can pay $24 per year for unlimited video length and no cooldowns, along with other perks like person detection. The stated battery life is between three and six months, but mine needed a charge before it reached three. This camera model was not one of those affected by the security flaw that Wyze failed to fix or report to customers for three years, but repeated security breaches from Wyze, exposing thousands of camera feeds to other customers, made it hard to recommend its cameras. We are currently considering testing Wyze cameras again after the firm beefed up its security policies.

    I have also tested the Wyze Cam OG and Wyze Cam OG Telephoto, an interesting pair of affordable cameras that work well together. The OG gives you a 120-degree wide view and sports a spotlight, and the OG Telephoto has a 3X optical zoom. For example, you might have the OG cover your backyard and use the Telephoto to focus on the gate area, and you can set up a picture-in-picture view in the Wyze app. Both are IP65-rated, but if you want to use an outdoor socket, you have to buy the Wyze Outdoor Power Adapter.

    Noorio Spotlight Cam B210: This orb-shaped wireless security camera comes with a magnetic mount for easy positioning. The 2K video is reasonably sharp, but I found that bright sun completely blew out areas of the footage. The 16 GB of built-in storage is welcome, but I had some connection issues where the camera went offline without alerting me, and recorded clips sometimes refused to play back. I also tested the similar, cheaper B200 ($70), which maxes out at 1080p and has 8 GB of storage, and the more expensive Noorio Floodlight Cam B310 ($110), which adds a 600-lumen floodlight, but both cameras had the same connectivity issues.

    Winees L1: This is an affordable outdoor security camera that comes with a solar panel, can record up to 2K video, and has 8 GB of storage onboard. There’s no need for a subscription, and it’s a pretty complete package. You even get onboard human, pet, and vehicle detection, though I found it a bit flaky. Unfortunately, this camera was often slow to start recording, so clips began with the subject halfway through the frame. The AiDot app that you use with this camera is also quite confusing, as it is designed to control a host of smart home devices.

    Encalife Outdoor Wi-Fi Security Camera: This affordable tethered camera must be plugged into an outlet. It connects via Wi-Fi or Ethernet cable, offers reasonably clear 1080p footage, and has pan, tilt, and zoom capabilities. You can record locally on a microSD card (sold separately) or sign up for cloud storage, but the iCSee app is flaky and lacks 2FA, so I have concerns about how secure it is. I also tested the more expensive Encalife Smart Surveillance Camera, which adds two-way audio but relies on the same flawed app, and the Encalife 4G Security Camera, which employs the even worse CamHi Pro app.

    Switchbot Outdoor Spotlight Cam: Simple to set up, this orb-shaped camera offers 1080p footage that is reasonably good quality, but it really struggles with mixed lighting, badly overexposing bright areas. There is decent night vision, a built-in spotlight, and two-way audio. You can also insert a microSD card up to 256 GB for local recording, which is just as well because the cloud subscription is far too expensive. Sadly, the busy app is flaky and sometimes drops or refuses to load the live feed. I liked the 5W solar panel option to keep the battery topped up, but you can get the same thing with better cameras than this.

    Canary Flex: I love the curved lozenge design of the Canary Flex, but it is by far the most unreliable security camera I tested. It frequently missed people walking past altogether, or started recording when they had almost left the frame. Night vision and low-light video quality are poor, and the app is very slow to load.

    How to Clean Your Mattress (2025)

    by: Julia Forbes

    From barf to blood, your stained mattress isn’t necessarily beyond repair. Here’s how to salvage your investment from every worst-case scenario.

    How to Clean Your Mattress

    From barf to blood, your stained mattress isn’t necessarily beyond repair. Here’s how to salvage your investment from every worst-case scenario.
    Image may contain Furniture Cleaning Person Brush Device Tool and Toothbrush
    Courtesy of Amazon; Getty Images

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    It’s important to know how to clean your mattress. Not just for day-to-day cleanliness and hygiene, but let’s say you’re dealing with an emergency—a “my mattress is ruined" situation where you have the frantic energy of an emergency clean-up crew. Is a trip to the dump inevitable? Not necessarily.

    Before you think, “I’m so clean, this would never happen to me!” I’m telling you, it can. I've seen a lot over the course of my career as a professional mattress tester and certified sleep coach. If you plan to have your mattress for its full eight- to 10-year lifespan, you'll want to keep it as pristine as possible. I chatted with cleaning influencer and third-generation janitor Brandon Pleshek of Clean That Up to see how he would approach the common situations below.

    Scenario 1: Someone Peed the Bed

    Bissell Little Green vacuum
    Photograph: Bissell

    Bissell

    Little Green Portable Carpet Cleaner

    Life happens, sleep happens, and sometimes bladder control is an issue. This can be common at any age, from little kids to seniors. Or, maybe your pet had an accident. I’ve been there. Time is of the essence with this situation, to avoid a stain and—more urgently—smells from taking root. According to Pleshek, the quicker you address a fresh urine stain, the better. “Speed is gonna help,” he says. “The longer you let the urine sit, the more it’ll soak in, and the harder it’ll be to get it completely out.”

    According to Pleshek, urine contains a lot of salt. It will require more heavy-duty cleaning agents to adequately get it out. The solution of choice: enzyme cleaners, like Nature's Miracle ($13). “Enzymes are your best approach right away, because those can attack the urine stain instantly,” says Pleshek.

    Extracting via a Shop-Vac or portable carpet cleaner is also a great first step. “Suck as much of that out as possible so that it can’t go deeper. Enzymes help with odor.” When it comes to using enzymes, Pleshek cautions, “You have to make sure to let them sit for as long as they say on the label. Enzymes need time to work. The label’s the law, so do your best to follow it and that’ll help things clean up better.”

    Now, let's say that you don't have an enzyme cleaner handy. For fresh urine, using a clean towel or paper towels, blot at the stain to pick up as much moisture as you can. Grab a spray bottle (Pleshek says in a pinch, you can just grab a spray nozzle off a bottle you have and stick it on the bottle you're using) and put together a cup of white vinegar, two cups of cold water, and a few drops of either dish soap or laundry detergent. Mix well, and then spray down the affected area. After 10 to 15 minutes, grab a fresh towel or paper towels to blot up the solution. Then sprinkle baking soda over the stain like there's no tomorrow. Once the spot is fully covered, leave it alone for eight to 10 hours—again, use your judgement based on how bad the stain is. Once Mount Baking Soda has dried up, and enough time has passed, you can vacuum it all up using a hose attachment.

    One note: Be wary of over-saturating your mattress. Leaving liquid behind can cause mold and mildew within your mattress.

    “Anytime you’re getting your mattress wet: vacuum, vacuum, and then when you think you’re done at vacuuming and extracting that out with a little spotter machine, do it two more times,” Pleshek says. “Always put a fan on it and get good airflow through the room.”

    Scenario 2: Your Period Arrived Early

    Image may contain: Food, Seasoning, Syrup, Bottle, and Shaker
    Courtesy of Amazon

    Amazon Basics

    Hydrogen Peroxide

    Looks like you have a crime scene on your hands: the crime being the mattress mess. Blood stains are a pain when it comes to removing them from any fabric, and mattresses are not exempt. Periods aren’t the only situations where blood could mysteriously appear; healing cuts, scabs, and nosebleeds are also common. The miracle cleanup go-to for bloody situations, according to Pleshek, is hydrogen peroxide.

    Pleshek’s cleanup process is this: “Grab a brown bottle, get a basic spray bottle, and mist the area where the blood is. Let it sit.” It’ll have a small reaction akin to a middle school science experiment, but that’s good. Leave it alone for a good 15 to 30 minutes, depending on the size and severity of your stain. “What’s kind of cool and fun about cleaning up blood with hydrogen peroxide is that you will see it bubble and it vanishes really fast,” adds Pleshek. “Follow up with a damp towel and blot a bit to remove the stain.”

    Scenario 3: “Mom, I Threw Up”

    Image may contain: Can, Spray Can, Tin, Cleaning, Person, Bottle, and Shaker
    Courtesy of Nature's Miracle

    Nature's Miracle

    Stain and Odor Remover

    Time is, once again, of the essence here. “Vomit is extremely acidic,” says Pleshek. Depending on what was eaten, whether that be food or medication, it can make bile even more acidic than is typical. You need to act quickly to address the stain—and the smell. If any vomit made its way onto the mattress itself, remove any residual solids off the surface—you may want to wear gloves for this one.

    Enzyme cleaner is once again going to be your go-to. However, removing the excess vomit is a crucial step—you can't just spray it on top of the mess as is and hope for the best. According to Pleshek, the enzyme cleaner isn’t going to be able to efficiently do its thing if all the excess hasn’t been adequately removed first.

    Scenario 4: Food Stains

    Image may contain: Bottle, and Shaker
    Courtesy of Dawn

    Dawn

    Ultra Dish Soap

    I don’t think you’re going to be spilling chili all over your bed like Kevin in that scene from The Office, but I won’t discount any possibilities. First, Pleshek says to grab a spray bottle, a tablespoon of dish soap, and warm water. From there, “lightly agitate it with a toothbrush or soft material to suspend the soil.” Follow with a spotter machine.

    If something has the tenacity to stick around even after that, time to bring back our friend hydrogen peroxide. “Mist [the stain] with hydrogen peroxide, and let it sit. The hydrogen peroxide should be able to pull out the color,” Pleshek says. He suggests doing this as a multistep process, because hydrogen peroxide and a degreaser don’t work well simultaneously. While this two-prong approach may take more time and evaluation as you go, it’s the recommended way to tackle the stain.

    Save the Day, Your Mattress, and Your Sanity

    Image may contain: Furniture, Bed, and Mattress
    Courtesy of Amazon

    Utopia Bedding

    Zippered Mattress Encasement

    This is one of my nonnegotiables, and it’s backed by Pleshek: Get a waterproof mattress protector or encasement. It may save you a lot of heartache from big messes. These cleanup tips hopefully prove to be helpful. But from experience, you may breathe one big sigh of relief when you just have to handle bedding and not the bed itself by using one of these as a fail-safe.

    Peacock Feathers Are Stunning. They Can Also Emit Laser Beams

    by: Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica

    Scientists hope their plumage project could someday lead to biocompatible lasers that could safely be embedded in the human body.

    Peacock Feathers Are Stunning. They Can Also Emit Laser Beams

    Scientists hope their plumage project could someday lead to biocompatible lasers that could safely be embedded in the human body.
    Macro detail of water drops on a peacock feather taken on January 26 2014.
    Macro photograph of water drops on a peacock feather.Photograph: James Paterson/Getty Images

    Peacock feathers are greatly admired for their bright iridescent colors, but it turns out they can also emit laser light when dyed multiple times, according to a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. Per the authors, it's the first example of a biolaser cavity within the animal kingdom.

    As previously reported, the bright iridescent colors in things like peacock feathers and butterfly wings don't come from any pigment molecules but from how they are structured. The scales of chitin (a polysaccharide common to insects) in butterfly wings, for example, are arranged like roof tiles. Essentially, they form a diffraction grating, except photonic crystals only produce certain colors, or wavelengths, of light, while a diffraction grating will produce the entire spectrum, much like a prism.

    In the case of peacock feathers, it's the regular, periodic nanostructures of the barbules—fiber-like components composed of ordered melanin rods coated in keratin—that produce the iridescent colors. Different colors correspond to different spacing of the barbules.

    Both are naturally occurring examples of what physicists call photonic crystals. Also known as photonic bandgap materials, photonic crystals are “tunable,” which means they are precisely ordered in such a way as to block certain wavelengths of light while letting others through. Alter the structure by changing the size of the tiles, and the crystals become sensitive to a different wavelength. (In fact, the rainbow weevil can control both the size of its scales and how much chitin is used to fine-tune those colors as needed.)

    Even better (from an applications standpoint), the perception of color doesn't depend on the viewing angle. And the scales are not just for aesthetics; they help shield the insect from the elements. There are several types of manmade photonic crystals, but gaining a better and more detailed understanding of how these structures grow in nature could help scientists design new materials with similar qualities, such as iridescent windows, self-cleaning surfaces for cars and buildings, or even waterproof textiles. Paper currency could incorporate encrypted iridescent patterns to foil counterfeiters.

    There have been prior examples of random laser emissions in everything from stained bovine bones and blue coral skeletons to insect wings, parrot feathers, and human tissue, as well as salmon iridiphores. The authors of this most recent study were interested in whether they could produce similar laser emissions using peacock feathers and hopefully identify the specific mechanism.

    It wasn't difficult to get the peacock feathers, given how popular they are for decorative and arts and crafts purposes, but the authors did make sure none of the feathers used in their experiments contained impurities (like dyes). They cut away any excess lengths of barbs and mounted the feathers on an absorptive substrate. They then infused the feathers with common dyes by pipetting the dye solution directly onto them and letting them dry. The feathers were stained multiple times in some cases. Then they pumped the samples with pulses of light and measured any resulting emissions.

    The team observed laser emissions in two distinct wavelengths for all color regions of the feathers' eyespots, with the green color regions emitting the most intense laser light. However, they did not observe any laser emission from feathers that were only stained once, just in sample feathers that underwent multiple wetting and complete drying cycles. This is likely due to the better diffusion of both dye and solvent into the barbules, as well as a possible loosening of the fibrils in the keratin sheath.

    The authors were unable to identify the precise microstructures responsible for the lasing; it does not appear to be due to the keratin-coated melatonin rods. Coauthor Nathan Dawson of Florida Polytechnic University suggested to Science that protein granules or similar small structures inside the feathers might function as a laser cavity. He and his colleague think that one day, their work could lead to the development of biocompatible lasers that could safely be embedded in the human body for sensing, imaging, and therapeutic purposes.

    This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

    9 Best Indoor Security Cameras (2025): For Homes and Apartments

    by: Simon Hill

    Cameras can offer peace of mind, but choose carefully before inviting one into your home.

    The Best Indoor Security Cameras

    Cameras can offer peace of mind, but choose carefully before inviting one into your home.

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    Featured in this article
    Best Indoor Security Camera
    TP-Link Tapo C120
    Read more
    Best Upgrade Camera
    Arlo Essential Indoor Security Camera (2nd Gen)
    Read more
    Smartest Security Camera
    Google Nest Cam (Wired, Indoor)
    Read more
    Best Panning Camera
    TP-Link Tapo C225 (TC73)
    Read more

    Compare Indoor Cameras

    CamerasPrice (MSRP)Video QualityRecordingAudioSmart Home
    Best Indoor Security Camera: TP-Link Tapo C120$402K, 20 fpsLocal microSD card (up to 512 GB) or cloudTwo-way audio, SirenAmazon Alexa, Google Home
    Best Upgrade Camera: Arlo Essential Indoor$802K, 24 fpsCloud-onlyTwo-way audio, SirenAmazon Alexa, Google Home, IFTTT
    Smartest Security Camera: Google Nest Cam$1001080p, 30 fpsCloud-onlyTwo-way audioGoogle Home
    Best Pan/Tilt: TP-Link Tapo C225$602K, 30 fpsLocal microSD card (up to 512 GB) or cloudTwo-way audio, SirenAmazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomeKit Secure Video
    A Smart Home Hub: Aqara Camera Hub G3$1102K, 20 fpsLocal microSD card (up to 128 GB) or cloudTwo-way audioAmazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomeKit Secure Video
    A Dual-Lens Camera: Eufy Indoor Cam S350$1404K + 2K, 15 fpsLocal microSD card (up to 128 GB), HomeBase S380, or cloudTwo-way audioAmazon Alexa, Google Home
    A Cheaper Dual-Lens Camera: Imilab C30 Dual$903K + 3K, 20 fpsLocal microSD card (up to 256 GB) or cloudTwo-way audioAmazon Alexa, Google Home
    For Homes With Philips Hue: Philips Hue Secure Wired$1301080p, 30 fpsCloud-onlyTwo-way audio, SirenPhilips Hue
    Another Affordable Camera: Amazon Blink Mini 2$401080p, 30 fpsLocal USB flash drive or cloudTwo-way audioAmazon Alexa

    Best MicroSD Cards

    Photograph: Amazon

    Many security cameras support local storage, enabling you to record videos on the camera or a linked hub. A few hubs have built-in storage, and some provide slots for hard drives, but most rely on microSD cards. Here are some details on what to look for (and a few recommendations).

    The microSD card you choose should have fast read and write speeds so that you can record high-quality video and play it back without delay. We recommend going for Class 10 microSD cards rated as U1 or U3. You can dive deeper into what that means in our SD card explainer. Before buying, check the card type, format, and maximum supported card size for your security camera. Consider how many hours of video each card capacity can store. For example, you might get a couple of days of HD video on a 32-GB card. If you want to record continuously, you likely want a higher-capacity card.

    I recommend formatting the card as soon as you insert it into the camera. You will usually be prompted to do this, but if not, there is generally an option in the settings. Just remember, formatting will wipe anything on the microSD card, so back up the contents first.

    Some security camera manufacturers offer their own branded microSD cards. They work just fine in my experience, but for maximum reliability, here are my favorites. Always remember to check the specs. Even different sizes of cards in the same range often have different capabilities.

    Other Indoor Cameras to Consider

    There are a lot of security cameras out there. Here are others I tried that didn't earn a top spot.

    Photograph: Simon Hill

    TP-Link Tapo HybridCam 360 C216 for $35: With a cute design that can sit on a table or shelf or be mounted the other way up, this camera has an IP65 rating, so it can also work outdoors, though it needs to be plugged in via the 6.6-foot USB-C cable. The video is sharp at up to 2K and 30 fps, and the C216 allows 360-degree pan and 152-degree tilt. It can track subjects and patrol, and there’s local video storage via microSD card. People detection is good, and it can recognize a baby crying (my cat can also trigger this). An excellent pan/tilt camera at a very competitive price, the only thing keeping this from a recommendation above is TP-Link’s slightly superior C225, but if your budget is limited and the C225 isn’t on sale, this is a great second choice.

    Lorex 2K Dual-Lens Indoor Pan-Tilt Camera

    Photograph: Simon Hill

    Lorex 2K Dual-Lens Indoor Pan-Tilt Camera for $100: There’s a lot to like about this dual-lens camera, with one fixed-view camera and a pan-and-tilt lens on top to track subjects and cover a 360-degree area. It offers crisp 2K video with HDR, smart motion detection for people and pets, and local storage on a microSD card up to 256 GB (32 GB included). There’s also two-way audio with a call button on the camera, capable of calling the app on your phone. The tracking was sometimes a bit ropey, and tapping through on notifications did not always load the clip, but it mostly worked well. Lorex was owned by Dahua (banned by the US government) until a Taiwanese firm, Skywatch, reportedly bought it in 2023.

    Eufy Indoor Cam E220 for $55: This is a solid alternative to TP-Link’s Tapo Pan Camera above. Eufy’s E220 also offers up to 2K footage with a 125-degree field of view but pans to cover 360 degrees horizontally and tilts through 95 degrees vertically. It has person and pet detection, can automatically track movement, offers local or cloud storage, and supports Google Home and Amazon Alexa. The weakness is the limited frame rate (15 fps), which can result in choppy footage.

    Ezviz C6 for $100: A cute design, crisp and clear video, and onboard AI and storage make this a compelling prospect. I like that the 2FA allows fingerprint unlock, it has a privacy mode, and it gives you the option to have gestures trigger a call. But the C6 struggled in mixed lighting, repeatedly identified my cat as a human intruder, and needs to be positioned low for the best view. I also tested the Ezviz C6N ($30), which had problems with subjects appearing blurry, and the Ezviz CP1 Pro (£30) and Ezviz SD7 (£130), which seem to be available only in the UK. The SD7 is a 7-inch portable screen with a battery inside that offers a dedicated view of your Ezviz cameras (up to 30), allowing you to play back video and control them where applicable, but that’s all it does, so I am slightly puzzled about why you would buy it over a smart display that can also do other stuff.

    Imilab C22 for $30: This is a decent pan (360 degrees) and tilt (115 degrees) camera that offers crisp 3K video, though I found it struggled with mixed lighting and tended to blow out bright areas, even with WDR turned on. You can insert a microSD card (up to 256 GB) for local storage or subscribe to cloud storage. It can track subjects but doesn’t return to the starting position when they walk out of frame. Things also get blurry when the camera moves, and it can be slow and jerky when attempting to track fast-moving subjects. It works with the Xiaomi Home app, so it's more attractive if you already have a Xiaomi phone or other gadgets from the Chinese brand.

    Psync Camera Genie S for $40: Easily the most interesting security camera I have tested, the unusual Psync Camera Genie S has a funky, blocky design that folds open to reveal a 2K camera and four LED lights. It records in a vertical format like TikTok, can pan 350 degrees and tilt 135 degrees, and has smart motion tracking. It supports two-way audio and has 32 or 64 GB of storage inside. In keeping with the AI trend, it is GPT-enabled, so if you spring for a ViewSay subscription ($1/month during Beta, then $7/month), it uploads frames of each video to a secure server and uses a visual language model to describe them for your notifications. This can have unintentionally hilarious results. Instead of getting a generic alert, it might say, “A man is opening a door, and a cat is behind him,” or, “A person is standing in a dark room, holding a baby, and looking at the camera.” Those are both real notifications I got, though the latter was actually my daughter holding a cat toy. ViewSay can also label objects in the room, but for most folks, it seems like a pointless gimmick, and it definitely needs to work on the accuracy to make it useful. The feed is quick to load, but I found the footage a bit blurry in low light (the maximum frame rate is 20), and the vertical orientation limits your field of view.

    Wiz Indoor Security Camera for $49: As a 1080p camera with a relatively narrow 120-degree field of view, the debut Wiz security camera is a hard sell. Parent company Signify owns Philips Hue, but Wiz is cheaper, and if you own any of its smart lights, you can use the camera to trigger them. It also works with the company’s SpaceSense technology to use Wi-Fi and your Wiz lights to detect motion. It supports two-way audio, sound detection, and night vision. You can insert a microSD card for local recording, but you need a subscription ($4/month) for activity zones, cloud storage, and manual recording. There is a privacy mode, but it lacks a shutter. It’s a reliable camera, but only worth considering for folks with Wiz lights. It comes with a USB cable, but no power adapter.

    TP-Link Tapo C210 for $25: If you want the ability to pan around the room, TP-Link’s Tapo C210 is another affordable indoor security camera with versatility. Like its sibling, our budget pick above, this camera supports up to 2K video, two-way audio, and local recordings via microSD cards up to 256 GB. But it has the same disappointing frame rate (15 frames per second), which can result in jerky video clips, which is more of a problem with a panning camera. There’s also some lag on the two-way audio, and the camera does not return to its starting position after tracking a subject, which can leave it facing the wrong way.

    Eve Cam for $100: This is a solid HomeKit security camera for Apple households. The footage is of reasonably good quality, the night vision works well, motion alerts are reliable, and it can generally distinguish pets from people. The magnetic base is quite handy, and it is easy to automate this camera through Apple’s Home app so that it turns on when you leave the house or triggers lights when it senses motion. But it is relatively expensive, and it only works with Apple devices. An iCloud storage plan (starting from $1 per month for one camera) and a HomePod or Apple TV to act as a HomeKit hub are essential.

    Panasonic Home Hawk

    Photograph: Panasonic

    Panasonic Home Hawk Window for $130: This camera sticks to the inside of a window, so you can keep an eye on the outside of your house without mounting anything—a huge plus if you're renting. The image quality is surprisingly clear, it has a decent 150-degree wide-angle view, and you can set detection to just people to avoid notifications for every car that drives past or bird that pops up. But, it's pricey, there's no 2FA, and there's no cloud storage, so you'll need a microSD card to view anything outside of a livestream.

    Blink Mini for $30: Compact, versatile, and cheap, the Blink Mini offers good-quality video, two-way audio, accurate motion detection, activity zones, and integration with Alexa. The 1080p footage is clear, even in low light, but bright areas can appear blown out. There is two-way audio, but it often lags and distorts. If you don’t want a subscription (from $3 per month), you can add a Sync Module 2 ($50) and record to a USB flash drive (sold separately). It worked reliably in my testing, but it detects any motion (it can’t distinguish between pets and people). You can also get the Blink Mini Pan-Tilt Camera for $40, which is a regular Blink Mini camera with a pan-and-tilt mount, so you can pan through 360 degrees and tilt through 135 degrees.

    Ezviz C1C for $27 and C6CN for $60: Ezviz's cameras are as affordable as Wyze's. The app has a really nice grid view, so you can easily watch a live feed of all your cameras, but there's a small delay when detecting motion—I set up the C6CN panning camera in my living room, and it didn't start recording until I made it from the door to the other side of the room. It always detected motion accurately, but the delay might be an issue if you're dealing with an intruder.

    TP-Link Kasa Spot for $23: I tried the Spot and the Spot Pan Tilt ($30), and both are impressive and inexpensive offerings from TP-Link. They have a wide field of view and decent motion detection that alerts you instantly. These cameras lacked two-factor authentication when I tested them, but the company has since added the feature to the Kasa app.

    About Amazon Ring Cameras

    Rectangular cylindrical security camera sitting on a wooden surface
    Photograph: Simon Hill
    Wired/Tired
    Wired
    • Crisp and clear video
    • Pre-roll captures seconds before event
    • Has a privacy shutter
    Tired
    • Limited resolution
    • Requires a subscription

    If you're already in the Ring or Amazon Alexa ecosystem, you might be eyeing the Ring Indoor Cam (2nd Gen). It records crisp 1080p footage at 24 frames per second, has optional color night vision, and has a privacy shutter you can swivel around when you don’t want it recording. You can get motion alerts, pre-roll captures a few seconds before each event, two-way audio is decent, and the Ring Indoor Cam has a built-in siren.

    The Ring app is feature-packed but can be slow to load the live feed and somewhat confusing to navigate, though there are good in-app tutorials. Unfortunately, cloud storage for your videos and the best features, like person alerts and rich notifications, require a Ring Protect Plan ($5 per month for one camera or $10 per month for all your cameras and doorbells). I don’t recommend this camera without the plan, as you are limited to the live feed, motion alerts, and two-way audio. The perfect spot is vital for this camera because it has a relatively limited 115-degree horizontal and 59-degree vertical field of view, and there is no HDR, so bright areas can blow out.

    But the biggest reason why this camera isn't a top pick? Ring is reintroducing a policy that would allow local law enforcement to request footage directly from Ring users. We stopped recommending Ring a few years ago due to this policy (among other reasons), but we began testing and recommending Ring hardware after it changed its tune. Now that it seems like it's reverting to its original roots, we have a hard time recommending Ring again.

    Don't Buy These

    Wyze Cam Pan V3

    Photograph: Wyze

    I didn't like every camera I tested. These are the ones to avoid.

    Wyze Cam Pan V3: This was our pick for the best panning camera because it can spin 360 degrees and tilt 180 degrees to take in a whole room. I also like the option to set waypoints in the app to have it cycle through, the privacy mode, the automatic motion tracking, and the ability to record locally on a microSD card (up to 256 GB). But after repeated security breaches from Wyze, most recently exposing thousands of camera feeds to other customers, it became impossible to recommend its cameras for use inside your home. We are currently considering testing Wyze cameras again after the firm beefed up its security policies.

    Chamberlain myQ Smart Indoor Security Camera: While we love the MyQ Garage Opener, the firm’s foray into security cameras was not as successful. We had issues getting the camera up and running, the MyQ app was slow and buggy, and a subscription starting from $4 per month is required if you want to record video (there’s no local option). The 1080p resolution is OK, but the night vision is weak, and there are several better options above.

    Nooie 360 Cam 2: We liked the original Nooie 360 Cam. This version sports a similar design, allowing for almost 360-degree rotation and 94-degree tilt, and bumps the video resolution up to 2K. It takes microSD cards (up to 128 GB), and cloud plans start from $1 per month for 7-day event recording. Unfortunately, alerts are not reliable (sometimes they didn’t come through to my phone). The Nooie app is buggy, and it often takes a frustratingly long time to load the video feed. Any motion triggers a recording (there’s no person or pet detection), and you can set the camera to track a subject or pan and tilt manually, but annoyingly, it doesn’t return to a default position. There is 2FA, but it’s optional.

    SwitchBot Indoor Camera and Pan/Tilt Cam: These cameras are affordable and offer clear video, but both struggled with exposure in mixed lighting. The app is a little flaky and crashed on me when I tried to play back video from an inserted microSD card, and there’s no 2FA. If you enable motion tracking, the pan cam also has the unfortunate habit of staying in the last position it tracked movement.

    Wyze Cam V3: While it offers good-quality video and works well on the whole, a price rise and limitations on the free service make this far less of a bargain than it used to be. It does boast local or cloud recordings, 2FA, and a choice of smart-home integrations. But this is one of the cameras that had a major security flaw that Wyze failed to fix for several years.

    The 45 Best Movies on Netflix Right Now (August 2025)

    by: Matt Kamen, WIRED Staff

    KPop Demon Hunters, Happy Gilmore 2, and The Old Guard 2 are just a few of the movies you should watch on Netflix this month.

    The 45 Best Movies on Netflix Right Now

    KPop Demon Hunters, Happy Gilmore 2, and The Old Guard 2 are just a few of the movies you should watch on Netflix this month.
    HAPPY GILMORE 2 from left Christopher McDonald Adam Sandler 2025. ph Scott Yamano © Netflix Courtesy Everett Collection
    Still from Happy Gilmore 2.Photograph: Scott Yamano/Everett Collection

    Netflix has plenty of movies to watch. Maybe too many. Sometimes finding the right film at the right time can seem like an impossible task. Let us help you. Below is a list of some of our favorites currently on the streaming service—from dramas to comedies to thrillers.

    If you decide you’re in more of a TV mood, head over to our collection of the best TV series on Netflix. Want more? Check out our lists of the best sci-fi movies, best movies on Amazon Prime, and the best flicks on Disney+.

    If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

    Happy Gilmore 2

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    Thirty years after graduating from ice hockey washout to golfing glory, Happy Gilmore (Adam Sandler) is down on his luck again. After his wife died in a freak golf accident, he’s now a single dad of five, struggling to send his talented dancer daughter to a ballet school in Paris. His only hope to scrape together the money he needs is to get back into the game. The only thing standing in his way are old rivals and a nefarious CEO trying to revamp the entire sport for the worst. Despite being packed with nods to the original film, in both returning cast members and general tone—expect peak ’90s Sandler crassness in places—Happy Gilmore 2 is a raucously funny sports comedy that sees Sandler playing well above par again.

    The Old Guard 2

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    It’s been a long five years since the original The Old Guard dropped on Netflix, adapting the graphic novels by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández into a budding franchise. Centered on a roving gang of immortals fronted by Charlize Theron as Andromache of Scythia—Andy to her friends—this long-gestating sequel expands on the lore, throwing her modern-day allies into a centuries-old grudge match against old flame Quỳnh (Veronica Ngô). Meanwhile the newest immortal Nile (KiKi Layne) comes face-to-face with the very first, Discord (Uma Thurman, absolutely vamping it in a villainous role and seemingly loving it). The Old Guard 2 sadly doesn’t reach the same exhilarating heights as the first film—at its worst, it’s choppily edited and lacks focus—but it’s an entertaining outing that further cements Theron as an action megastar.

    Brick

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    When workaholic game developer Tim (Matthias Schweighöfer, Army of the Dead) and his partner Liv (Ruby O. Fee) break up, Liv finds it hard to walk away. Quite literally, as their apartment block has been mysteriously surrounded by an impenetrable wall. Left with no choice but to smash through walls and ceilings to find a way out, teaming with other residents trapped inside as they do, the group desperately searches for an escape route—but the strange barrier and the building itself seems set on stopping them. Reminiscent at times of cult classic Cube, this German-language sci-fi thriller (there's an English language dub, but it's truly terrible—stick with subtitles) is schlocky but satisfying entertainment.

    Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

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    Twenty years after their last feature-length outing, not-so-intrepid inventor Wallace and his long-suffering canine companion Gromit are back. When criminal penguin Feathers McGraw—last seen in the classic The Wrong Trousers—learns of Wallace's easily-hackable robotic garden gnome Norbot, the nefarious villain hatches a plan for revenge, one that tears the heroes' friendship apart and leads to the greatest chase scene tranquil Yorkshire has ever seen. Irrepressibly charming and relentlessly daft, this stop-motion-animated comedy from the geniuses at Aardman—the studio behind Chicken Run—is a pure delight.

    KPop Demon Hunters

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    Three-part harmony group Huntr/x are at the top of their game. Not only are they the world's best-loved girl group, but in their secret side role as Earth's defenders against demonic forces, they're about to permanently seal away an ancient evil. Unfortunately, lead singer Rumi (Arden Cho) is hiding something from bandmates Mira (May Hong) and Zoey (Ji-young Yoo), and her dark secret may tear them apart right as they face their strongest foes—an evil boyband fronted by the devilishly handsome Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop). Blending the pastel-pop of Jem and the Holograms, the monster-slaying action of Buffy, and enough K-pop earworms to make Blackpink blink, Kpop Demon Hunters is a perfect summer movie for kids and families, a brilliantly animated adventure that's as fresh and memorable as its energetic musical numbers.

    Always Be My Maybe

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    Written by and starring Ali Wong and Randall Park, Always Be My Maybe tells the story of two inseparable childhood friends whose lives veer dramatically apart after a grief-stricken rendezvous in their teenage years. Wong plays Sasha Tran, a superstar chef whose stratospheric career barely papers over the cracks in her faltering relationship. Park, meanwhile, plays Marcus Kim, whose ambitions have taken him no further than the local dive bar and his father's air conditioning firm. Fate—and a bizarre cameo from Keanu Reeves—conspire to bring the two leads back together in a film that at long last lifts Asian Americans outside of Hollywood's clichéd casting and into a thoughtful and hilarious romantic comedy.

    Our Times

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    In 1966, husband and wife physicists Nora (Lucero) and Héctor (Benny Ibarra) are equal partners at the University of Mexico, even though their colleagues see Nora as little more than Héctor's lab assistant. Then they crack the secret of time travel, catapulting themselves forward to 2025—and strand themselves here. While both marvel at the leaps humanity has made in half a century, Nora is delighted to be reunited with her former protégé Julia (Ofelia Medina), now dean of the university. But as Héctor finds himself desperate to return to the comfort and prestige he enjoyed in the past, the pair's relationship begins to fall apart. More rom-com than sci-fi, this is time-travel with a bittersweet touch.

    Barbarian

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    When Tess (Georgina Campbell) finds her Airbnb in a sketchy neighborhood double-booked with Keith (Bill Skarsgård), you will probably think you know where Barbarian is headed. You don't—and you should brace yourself for everything that follows. Written and directed by Zach Cregger (in a seismic departure from his comedy background), Barbarian constantly shifts, playing with—and regularly subverting—viewer expectations of horror movie clichés at every turn. Smartly written, brilliantly shot, and psychologically disturbing on multiple levels, Barbarian is a genuinely terrifying entry in the modern horror canon.

    Lost in Starlight

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    Dr. Nan-young Joo is desperate to follow in her late astronaut mother's footsteps and make it all the way to Mars. Jay is a slacker part-timer, loosely aspiring to be a musician. In this Korean animated movie from director Han Ji-won, they become a pair of literally star-crossed lovers, linked by a love of music. While the sci-fi aspect of it all makes for some spectacular visuals, from the futuristic-but-plausible view of Seoul in 2051, to truly cosmic, almost psychedelic, sequences as Nan-young ventures into space, the story's heart lies in the quieter, meaningful moments between its leads. Absolutely exquisite.

    Kill Boksoon

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    To her friends, Gil Bok-soon (Jeon Do-yeon) is a successful events executive and dedicated single mother to her daughter Jae-yeong (Kim Si-a). In reality, she's the star performer at MK Ent—an assassination bureau, where her almost superhuman ability to predict every step in a critical situation has earned her a 100 percent success rate and a legendary reputation. The only problem: She's considering retiring at the end of her contract, a decision that opens her to threats from disgruntled enemies and ambitious colleagues alike. While its title and premise not-so-subtly evokes Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, director Byun Sung-hyun takes this Korean action epic to giddy heights with some of the most impressive fights committed to screen since, well, Kill Bill.

    Mary and the Witch’s Flower

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    When Mary Smith moves to her great aunt’s estate in rural England, she finds herself unspeakably bored—until she finds a rare flower that blooms only once every seven years, coveted by witches for its magical properties. Soon, she's transported to Endor College, an academy for witches hidden in the clouds—but the warm welcome she receives from the fanciful faculty hides sinister secrets, and a dark ambition on the part of headmistress Madam Mumblechook that puts Mary's only friend, Peter, in danger. Adapted from Mary Stewart's novel The Little Broomstick and directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi (Arrietty, When Marnie Was There), Mary and the Witch’s Flower is a wonderful piece of family viewing, thrilling for kids with enough complexity for older viewers, and gorgeously animated from start to finish.

    Bullet Train Explosion

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    Kazuya Takaichi (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi) is conductor of the Hayabusa 60 shinkansen, zooming from Shin-Aomori to Tokyo. A perfectly normal job—until a terrorist reveals a bomb onboard, which will explode if the train slows below 100 kmph. As authorities race to stop the attacker and rescue the passengers, Kazuya is forced to keep everyone onboard safe. What's that? It's just Speed on a Japanese train? Nah, Speed was just the original 1975 The Bullet Train on an American bus—and this modern-day version is equal parts remake and sequel to that Sonny Chiba-starring classic. It's more than an entertaining action thriller, though—director Shinji Higuchi relishes the opportunity to poke fun at point-scoring politicians crippled by bureaucratic process in responding to the crisis (no surprise to anyone who's seen 2016's Shin Godzilla, which he codirected with Hideaki Anno). High-speed, literally explosive action, with a satirical edge, Bullet Train Explosion is a blast (sorry).

    Behind the Curtain: Stranger Things the First Shadow

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    If there's a Stranger Things–shaped hole in your life thanks to the approximate 4,738-year wait between seasons, this behind-the-scenes documentary focused on production of the West End stage show The First Shadow might go some way to filling it. While the film doesn't give the whole production away—itself a prequel, set in 1959 and exploring how the sleepy town of Hawkins became ground zero for all things spooky—it's a fascinating look at the technical wizardry that went into bringing the show to life and how director Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliott, Netflix's The Crown) and legendary theater producer Sonia Friedman worked with the Duffer Brothers to root everything in the lore and history of the series.

    The Imaginary

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    This gorgeously animated take on the concept of imaginary friends is a whimsical fable full of stunning visuals and big ideas. Adapted from the book by A. F. Harrold, The Imaginary follows young Amanda and her best friend Rudger—brought into being by her own mind—as they share countless adventures. But as Amanda ages, Rudger faces the fate of all Imaginaries: fading away as their humans forget them. The latest film from director Yoshiyuki Momose (Mary and the Witch’s Flower) and Studio Ponoc—spiritual successor to the mighty Studio Ghibli—this is a stunning ode to the power of imagination and friendship.

    Dead Talents Society

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    When keeping the living terrified is the economy of the afterlife, death becomes a literal capitalist hellhole. Dead Talents Society sees warring "ghostresses" Catherine (Sandrine Pinna) and her former protégé Jessica (Eleven Yao) battling for glamour and prestige in the great beyond by innovating new ways of scaring mortals, while a newcomer known only as Rookie (Gingle Wang) struggles to make her mark with any scares at all—and risks fading away entirely if she can't earn her undead keep. A sharply satirical horror comedy poking fun at everything from reality TV to hustle culture, this Taiwanese outing from writer-director John Hsu beats Beetlejuice at its own game.

    Leave the World Behind

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    A weekend getaway at a luxury vacation rental property for Amanda and Clay and their kids, Archie and Rose, takes a sinister turn in the wake of an inexplicable blackout. When the house's owner, George, and his daughter Ruth return early, suspicions mount—but a growing herd of deer lurking outside the house, failing vehicles, and scattered reports of attacks across the US force the two families to rely on each other in the face of what may be the end of the world. Adapted from the novel of same name by Rumaan Alam, and with a star-studded cast including Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, Myha'la, and Kevin Bacon, this relishes in keeping the audiences as uncertain as its characters, explaining little, and leaving questions you'll be mulling for days.

    Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

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    Miles Morales’ (Shameik Moore) growth as Spider-Man continues in this phenomenal sequel to the Academy Award–winning Into the Spider-Verse—but this time, the web-slinger's neighborhood is a lot bigger and a lot less friendly. Introduced to a multiversal “Spider Society” led by the imposing Spider-Man 2099 (Oscar Isaac), Miles finds he's the only Spider-Man not invited—and that an unavoidable tragedy lies in his future. Even more visually ambitious than its predecessor, with each alternate reality—and the heroes that call them home, including Gwen Stacey Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld), Spider-Man India (Karan Soni), and Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya)—brought to life with distinctive design and animation styles, Across the Spider-Verse is an almost unspeakably ambitious outing. It's also one that balances sheer spectacle with darker, more emotional conflicts for Miles, offering neither him nor viewers any easy answers. A film so brilliant that the wait for the upcoming third installment, Beyond the Spider-Verse, becomes increasingly painful with every passing day.

    Troll

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    This gleefully entertaining giant monster movie abandons tearing up Tokyo or New York in favor of director Roar Uthaug’s (2018's Tomb Raider) native Norway, with a titanic troll stomping its way toward Oslo after being roused by a drilling operation. Although the plot and characters will be familiar to any fan of kaiju cinema, the striking Nordic visuals and the titular menace’s ability to blend in with the landscape, allows for some impressively original twists along the way. Although Troll could have easily descended into near-parody, Uthaug steers clear of smug self-awareness and instead delivers, and with a sequel arriving later in 2025, now is the perfect time to revisit one of the freshest takes on the genre in years.

    Y Tu Mamá También

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    It's uncommon to find much in the way of classic films on Netflix—the algorithm must ever be fed by the churn of the new—so the availability of Alfonso Cuarón's brilliant 2001 coming-of-age movie is a real delight. Set in Mexico in 1999, Y Tu Mamá También (“And your mother, too”) follows rich kid Tenoch (Diego Luna) and his working-class friend Julio (Gael García Bernal) on a road trip with Luisa (Maribel Verdú), the wife of Tenoch’s cousin. It's a journey that sees the young men—still boys, really—competing for attention from the beautiful older woman, trapping themselves in lies and trying to get by on unearned confidence, all while claiming to be heading to a picture-perfect beach that they made up. As for why the much more mature and experienced Luisa would go along with them in the first place? Pack tissues. While the film courted controversy for its frank depiction of sex and drugs (it's not one for family film night), it remains a masterpiece; a raucous and all-too-real examination of young friendships and fragile masculinity.

    Parasite

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    Director Bong Joon-ho's searing 2019 thriller is the first non-English film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, and it's abundantly clear why. Its bleak exploration of economic disparity and condemnation of capitalistic excess is focused on its South Korea setting, but it resonates with global audiences. Parasite follows the struggling Kim family as they each infiltrate the lives of the wealthy Parks, posing as household servants to live a life of proximate luxury before their deception spirals wildly out of control. Somehow, it's also darkly comedic, mocking the obliviousness of the rich classes, both to their own privileges and to the desperation of the poor. Throughout, it's exquisitely shot and expertly paced, with Bong deftly increasing the tension with every scene until everything approaches a seemingly inevitable conclusion—and then still manages to twist and subvert audience expectations. A spectacular piece of filmmaking that deserves the hype, this examination of class and inequality feels more relevant than ever.

    Carry-On

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    Is a movie set at Christmas in itself a Christmas movie? That debate has surged around Die Hard for decades. Now Carry-On asks the same question. A zippy thriller from House of Wax and Black Adam director Jaume Collet-Serra, this sees TSA agent Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) caught in the Christmas Eve shift from hell when he’s blackmailed by a mercenary known only as the Traveler (Jason Bateman) into allowing a deadly package through security. Cue a lethal game of cat-and-mouse as Ethan tries to stop the Traveler—all with the life of Ethan’s girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson) in the balance. It’s pulpy and schlocky in places, but this throwback action outing can’t help but entertain.

    Joy

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    In vitro fertilization may seem like a relatively mundane medical procedure nowadays, one that's brought hope and family to countless people struggling to conceive, but when the procedure was developed by a trio of British scientists and medics in the 1960s and '70s, it was hugely controversial. That makes for powerful material for this dramatization, charting the work of nurse and embryologist Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie), scientist Robert Edwards (James Norton), and surgeon Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy), even as they're demonized by the public, the UK government, and even—perhaps especially—the church. McKenzie in particular is brilliant as Purdy, torn by her own conflict of faith at being involved in the life-changing work, which also involved providing safe abortion care to women who needed it, and struggling to deal with the ostracizing she faces from her family and community as a result. A powerful and provocative drama, even now.

    Woman of the Hour

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    A serial killer is cast as a bachelor on a dating game show, allowing him to size up his next potential victim right in front of the audience watching at home. That'd be a twisted setup for a slasher flick—but what's horrifying about Woman of the Hour is that it's based on the real-life case of Rodney Alcala, who was a contestant on The Dating Game in 1978 while in the midst of a string of murders. This dramatization isn't centered on the killer, though. In her directorial debut, Anna Kendrick focuses instead on Sheryl (played by Kendrick, based on the real life Cheryl Bradshaw), the one unfortunate enough to be matched with Alcala (Daniel Zovatto), and the women who reported or suspected the killer, only to be routinely ignored by authorities. A taut thriller that makes clear the real horror lies in how easily Acala eluded attention for so long.

    Will & Harper

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    Will Ferrell likely needs no introduction, but as former head writer of Saturday Night Live, Harper Steele is more accustomed to life behind the camera. Joining the hit show in the same week back in 1995, the pair struck up a decades-long friendship—so when Harper wrote to tell Ferrell she was transitioning to live as a woman, it was a big change for them both. It also formed the basis for this beautiful, heartwarming, and often laugh-out-loud funny road trip documentary following the duo as they cross the US in an old Jeep Grand Wagoneer, reconnecting and learning what their friendship looks like now. It's awkward viewing at times—some of Ferrell's questions blur the line between bawdy and simply rude—but it's a raw and authentic journey for them both. Beyond the personal touches, Will & Harper is a timely view of what America looks like for a trans person right now, making it possibly one of the most important documentaries Netflix has produced.

    His Three Daughters

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    As their father approaches the end of his life, sisters Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), Katie (Carrie Coon), and Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) are forced to reconnect while waiting for the inevitable. Bleak stuff, but also grounds for masterful performances from the lead trio, with Rachel having taken on the bulk of care for months, Katie casting imperious demands despite avoiding the situation, and new-agey Christina trying to keep the peace—despite being at a breaking point herself. This is almost a locked-room piece, the apartment trapping the women, forcing them to come to terms with not only their father's death but their own relationships with each other, all while Vincent (Jay O. Sanders) haunts them even before his passing. Death may loom over director Azazel Jacobs’ drama, but His Three Daughters ultimately proves oddly life-affirming.

    Grave of the Fireflies

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    When Seita and his young sister Setsuko are orphaned in the wake of the fire-bombing of Kobe during the final days of World War II, the siblings are forced into terrible circumstances to survive. Stuck between abusive extended family and the sheer desperation of scavenging around the ruins of their destroyed hometown, it's a bleak existence—and also the basis for one of Studio Ghibli's finest works. Directed by Isao Takahata and based on a short story by Akiyuki Nosaka, Grave of the Fireflies is unapologetically harrowing in its exploration of how war and nationalism chew up the most vulnerable, yet peppered with moments of unwavering love as Seita attempts to protect Setsuko's innocence. This searing wartime drama is sobering but essential viewing, a film that's more than earned its ranking in the upper echelons of the Best Studio Ghibli films.

    Rebel Ridge

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    When corrupt cops run ex-Marine Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) off the road for cycling while Black, they also seize the money he had been planning to use to post his cousin’s bail. Despite the injustice, Terry tries to do everything by the book but finds almost every aspect of the legal system against him. Out of patience, and fueled by immensely justified anger, he sets about tearing out the rot from the small town, aided only by court clerk Summer (AnnaSophia Robb). Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier could have made Rebel Ridge merely a modern day First Blood, but while there’s plenty of visceral, bone-breaking fight scenes, it’s the film’s righteously angry look at the baked-in failings of the American legal system that gives this its bite—all while cementing Pierre as an action star to watch.

    Under Paris

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    This so-serious-it's-ludicrous French creature feature sees Bérénice Bejo as marine specialist Sophia Assalas, who is hunting down a mako shark that has not only spontaneously mutated to survive in the freshwater Seine but is also about to give birth to a host of baby man-eating sharks. Worse still? Paris is about to hold a triathlon, with the swim portion set to become an all-you-can-eat buffet! Look, not everything on this list needs to be high art—sometimes, you just need to see a mutant shark straight up chomping on people while increasingly desperate humans start blowing stuff up. Press Play, turn brain off, enjoy.

    Hit Man

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    Gary Johnson (Glen Powell) is a mild-mannered professor of philosophy—and a contract killer. Well, not quite. He just poses as one, working with the New Orleans Police Department to trap people looking to hire a hit man. It's a role he's surprisingly good at, but when Madison (Adria Arjona) looks to have her abusive husband “dealt” with, Gary begins to fall for her—and the consequences could be fatal for real. In another creator’s hands, Hit Man might have been either overly grim or simply insubstantial (it's loosely based on a true story), but director Richard Linklater leverages his signature uses of sparkling dialog and brilliantly realized characters to deliver a smart action-comedy that explores the roles people play in society as much as it serves up mistaken-identity hijinks.

    Godzilla Minus One

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    Despite the presence of the eponymous kaiju, Godzilla Minus One is a film rooted in the humanity of its protagonists, deserter kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and Noriko Ōishi (Minami Hamabe), a survivor of the bombings of Tokyo. Thrown together as an ersatz family as they raise an orphaned baby, their attempts to build a new life turn chaotic when the irradiated reptile descends on the city just as it's beginning to recover. Director Takashi Yamazaki's reimagining of Japan's premier kaiju netted the King of Monsters its first-ever Oscar, picking up a statue for Best Visual Effects at the 2024 Academy Awards, but this is a film that exceeds mere spectacle—it's a searing examination of life after war, and how a nation grapples with being on the losing side.

    Suzume

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    Suzume Iwato (voiced by Nanoka Hara in Japanese, Nichole Sakura in English) lives with her aunt on Japan's southern island, having lost her mother in the Tōhoku earthquake of 2011. When a handsome young stranger named Souta (Hokuto Matsumura, Josh Keaton) asks her for directions to some local ruins, she follows him out of curiosity but disturbs a living keystone, accidentally unleashing an ancient power that threatens to destroy the entire country. Drawn into Souta's world, the pair chase the keystone, now in the form of a cat, across Japan in a desperate bid to reseal the destructive entity—a quest that would be easier if Souta hadn't been transformed into a child's wooden chair. The latest film from Makoto Shinkai (Your Name, Weathering with You), Suzume is a breathtakingly animated slice of magical realism with a surrealist edge—but beyond the spectacle, it's a heart-warming tale of community and humanity, each stop on the unlikely pair's journey a snapshot of people and families coming together in the wake of tragedy.

    Rustin

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    Directed by George C. Wolfe (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom), this biopic explores the life of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. While perhaps best known as one of the chief organizers of 1963's March on Washington, Rustin was also openly, unapologetically gay at a time when that was phenomenally rare—and the film doesn't shy away from how that alienated many of the people he worked with, his sexuality often seen as a threat to the movement. A much-needed spotlight on an overlooked but pivotal figure in the Civil Rights Movement, elevated by a central performance from a spectacularly well-cast Colman Domingo as Rustin himself.

    His House

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    Fleeing war-torn South Sudan, Bol (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) are now living in a run-down house at the edge of London, harassed by their neighbors even as they try to fit in. The couple are also haunted by the lives they left behind—both figuratively and (possibly) literally, with visions of their late daughter Nyagak, who did not survive the journey, fading in and out of the walls of their dismal new home. The real horror of His House isn't the strange visions, haunted house, or potential ghosts, though—it’s the bleakness of the lives Bol and Rial are forced into, the hostility and dehumanization of the UK asylum process, the racism both overt and casual, all coupled with the enormous sense of loss they carry with them. Blending the macabre with the mundane, director Remi Weekes delivers a tense, challenging film that will haunt viewers as much as its characters.

    The Black Book

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    Paul Edima (Richard Mofe-Damijo) lives a peaceful life as a church deacon, trying to atone for—or at least forget—his former deeds as a highly trained special agent. Plans to leave his violent and bloody past behind fall apart when his son is framed for a murder and then killed by corrupt police, forcing him to fall back on old skills as he seeks vengeance. Shades of Taken, yes, but it's director Editi Effiong's raw energy and fresh takes on familiar action movie formulas that—backed by one of the highest budgets in "Nollywood" history—have this gritty outing topping the most-watched lists as far afield as South Korea. Expand your cinematic horizons and see what the fuss is about.

    Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate

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    Centered on the eponymous Berlin nightclub, this documentary explores the lives of LGBTQ+ people during the interwar years, from the roaring 1920s through the rise of the Nazis and into the horrors of World War II. With a blend of archival footage, recreations, and first-person accounts, director Benjamin Cantu paints a picture of gleeful decadence, the Eldorado as an almost hallowed ground where performers and patrons alike experimented with gender expression and were free to openly display their sexuality. It's an ode to what was lost, but with an eye on the bizarre contradictions of the age, where openly gay club-goers would wear their own Nazi uniforms as the years went by. Everything the Nazis Hate is emotionally challenging viewing in places, but it serves up an important slice of queer history that many will be completely unaware of.

    Marry My Dead Body

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    Wu Ming-han (Greg Hsu) is not a great guy. A homophobic police officer, his life—and prejudices—are changed when he picks up an unassuming red envelope while investigating a case. Now bound under “ghost marriage” customs to Mao Mao (Austin Lin), a gay man who died under mysterious circumstances, Wu has to solve his “husband's” death before he can get on with his life. Directed by Cheng Wei-hao, better known for his thrillers and horror movies, Marry My Dead Body sees the Taiwanese director bring his supernatural stylings to this ghostly absurdist comedy for a film that transcends borders.

    They Cloned Tyrone

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    Drug dealer Fontaine (John Boyega) got shot to death last night. So why has he just woken up in bed as if nothing happened? That existential question leads Fontaine and two unlikely allies—prostitute Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) and pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx)—to uncovering a vast conspiracy centered on a Black-majority town called The Glen, where people are kept mollified by hypnotic rap music, dumbed down with drug-laced fried chicken and grape juice, and preached into obedience at church. But who’s using the town as a petri dish, and why is there a cloning lab buried underground? This lethally sharp satire from writer and debut director Juel Taylor masterfully blends genres, from the use of visual motifs and dated clichés from 1970s Blaxploitation cinema to its frequent steps into sci-fi territory and laugh-out-loud comedy. But it’s the powerhouse performances from its central cast that mark this as one to watch.

    Nimona

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    Shapeshifter Nimona can become anything she wants, a gift that causes people to fear and shun her. If society is going to treat her like a villain, she's going to be one, so she decides to become the sidekick of the hated black knight, Ballister Blackheart. Unfortunately for the aspiring menace, Blackheart isn't quite the monster he's made out to be, and he instead tries to rein in Nimona's more murderous tendencies as he seeks to clear his name of a crime he didn't commit—and face down his old friend Ambrosius Goldenloin in the process. Adapted from N. D. Stevenson's groundbreaking graphic novel, Nimona is more than just another fanciful fantasy—it's a tale of outsiders and exiles, people trying to do right even when their community rejects them, and the joy of finding their own little band along the way. After an almost decade-long journey to the screen, this dazzlingly animated movie has become an instant classic.

    Cargo

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    In a world already ravaged by a zombie-like plague, Andy Rose (Martin Freeman) only wants to keep his family safe, sticking to Australia’s rural back roads to avoid infection. After his wife is tragically bitten, and infects him in turn, Andy is desperate to find a safe haven for his infant daughter, Rosie. With a mere 48 hours until he succumbs himself, Andy finds an ally in Thoomi (Simone Landers), an Aboriginal girl looking to protect her own rabid father. But with threats from paranoid survivalists and Aboriginal communities hunting the infected, it may already be too late. A unique twist on the zombie apocalypse, Cargo abandons the familiar urban landscapes of the genre for the breathtaking wilds of Australia and offers a slower, character-led approach to the end of the world.

    Call Me Chihiro

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    An idyllic slice-of-life movie with a twist, Call Me Chihiro follows a former sex worker—the eponymous Chihiro, played by Kasumi Arimura—after she moves to a seaside town to work in a bento restaurant. This isn’t a tale of a woman on the run or trying to escape her past—Chihiro is refreshingly forthright and unapologetic, and her warmth and openness soon begin to change the lives of her neighbors. Directed by Rikiya Imaizumi, this is an intimate, heartfelt character drama that alternates between moments of aching loneliness and sheer joy, packed with emotional beats that remind viewers of the importance of even the smallest connections.

    Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

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    Daniel Craig reprises his role as detective Benoit Blanc in this brilliant follow-up to 2019’s phenomenal whodunnit, Knives Out. Writer-director Rian Johnson crafts a fiendishly sharp new case for “the Last of the Gentlemen Sleuths,” taking Blanc to a Greek island getaway for a reclusive tech billionaire and his collection of friends and hangers-on, where a planned murder mystery weekend takes a deadly turn. While totally accessible for newcomers, fans of the first film will also be rewarded with some deeper character development for Blanc, a role that’s shaping up to be as iconic for Craig as 007. As cleverly written and meticulously constructed as its predecessor, and featuring the kind of all-star cast—Edward Norton! Janelle Monáe! Kathryn Hahn! Leslie Odom Jr.! Jessica Henwick! Madelyn Cline! Kate Hudson! Dave Bautista!—that cinema dreams are made of, Glass Onion might be the best thing Netflix has dropped all year.

    The Wonder

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    Florence Pugh dazzles in this not-quite-horror film from Oscar-winning director Sebastián Lelio. Set in 1862, English nurse Lib Wright (Pugh) is sent to Ireland to observe Anna O’Donnell, a girl who claims to have not eaten in four months, subsisting instead on “manna from heaven.” Still grieving the loss of her own child, Lib is torn between investigating the medical impossibility and growing concern for Anna herself. Amid obstacles in the form of Anna’s deeply religious family and a local community that distrusts her, Lib’s watch descends into a tense, terrifying experience. Based on a book of the same name by Emma Donoghue, The Wonder is a beautiful yet bleakly shot period piece that explores the all-too-mortal horrors that unquestioning religious fervor and family secrets can wreak.

    RRR

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    One of India’s biggest films of all time, RRR (or Rise, Roar, Revolt) redefines the notion of cinematic spectacle. Set in 1920, the historical epic follows real-life Indian revolutionaries Alluri Sitrama Raju (Ram Charan) and Komaram Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.) but fictionalizes their lives and actions. Although they come from very different walks of life, their similarities draw them together as they face down sadistic governor Scott Buxton (Ray Stevenson) and his cruel wife, Catherine (Alison Doody). No mere period fluff, RRR is a bold, exciting, and often explosive piece of filmmaking that elevates its heroes to near-mythological status. Director S. S. Rajamouli deploys brilliantly shot action scenes—and an exquisitely choreographed dance number—that grab viewers’ attention and refuse to let go. Whether you’re a longtime fan of Indian cinema or just looking for an action flick beyond the Hollywood norm, RRR is not to be missed.

    I Lost My Body

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    An award winner at Cannes in 2019, this tale of burgeoning young love, obsession, and autonomous body parts is every bit as weird as you might expect for a French adult animated film. Director Jérémy Clapin charts the life of Naoufel, a Moroccan immigrant in modern-day France who falls for the distant Gabrielle, and Naoufel’s severed hand, which makes its way across the city to try to reconnect. With intersecting timelines and complex discussions about fate, I Lost My Body is often mind-bending yet always captivating, and Clapin employs brilliantly detailed animation and phenomenal color choices throughout. Worth watching in both the original French and the solid English dub featuring Dev Patel and Alia Shawkat, this one dares you to make sense of it all.

    Don’t Look Up

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    Frustrated by the world’s collective inaction on existential threats like climate change? Maybe don’t watch Don’t Look Up, director Adam McKay’s satirical black comedy. When two low-level astronomers discover a planet-killing comet on a collision course with Earth, they try to warn the authorities—only to be met with a collective “meh.” Matters only get worse when they attempt to leak the news themselves and have to navigate vapid TV hosts, celebrities looking for a signature cause, and an indifferent public. A bleakly funny indictment of our times, bolstered by a star-studded cast fronted by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, Don’t Look Up is, somewhat depressingly, one of the best portraits of humanity since Idiocracy.

    Trump Promised to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’ The New Rigs Are Nowhere to Be Found

    by: Deep Vakil

    With clean energy more cost-competitive than it once was, the White House’s oil-first strategy is faltering.

    Trump Promised to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’ The New Rigs Are Nowhere to Be Found

    With clean energy more cost-competitive than it once was, the White House’s oil-first strategy is faltering.
    Image may contain Helmet Adult Person Computer Hardware Electronics Hardware Monitor Screen and Construction
    Photograph: Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images

    This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    “We will drill, baby, drill,” President Donald Trump declared at his inauguration on January 20. Echoing the slogan that exemplified his energy policies during the campaign, he made his message clear: more oil and gas, lower prices, greater exports.

    Six months into Trump’s second term, his administration has little to show on that score. Output is ticking up, but slower than it did under the Biden administration. Pump prices for gasoline have bobbed around where they were in inauguration week. And exports of crude oil in the four months through April trailed those in the same period last year.

    The White House is discovering, perhaps the hard way, that energy markets aren’t easily managed from the Oval Office—even as it moves to roll back regulations on the oil and gas sector, offers up more public lands for drilling at reduced royalty rates, and axes Biden-era incentives for wind and solar.

    “The industry is going to do what the industry is going to do,” said Jenny Rowland-Shea, director for public lands at the Center for American Progress, a progressive policy think tank.

    That’s because the price of oil, the world’s most-traded commodity, is more responsive to global demand and supply dynamics than to domestic policy and posturing.

    The market is flush with supplies at the moment, as the Saudi Arabia-led cartel of oil-producing nations known as OPEC+ allows more barrels to flow, while China, the world’s top oil consumer, curbs its consumption. Within the US, a boom in energy demand driven by rapid electrification and AI-serving data centers is boosting power costs for homes and businesses, yet fossil fuel producers are not rushing to ramp up drilling.

    There is one key indicator of drilling levels that the industry has watched closely for more than 80 years: a weekly census of active oil and gas rigs published by Baker Hughes. When Trump came into office on Janunary 20, the US rig count was 580. Last week, the most recent figure, it was down to 542—hovering just above a four-year low reached earlier in the month.

    The most glaring factor behind this stagnant rig count is the current level of crude oil prices. Take the US benchmark grade: West Texas Intermediate crude. Its prices were near $66 a barrel on July 28, after hitting a four-year low of $62 in May. The break-even level for drilling new wells is somewhere close to $60 per barrel, according to oil and gas experts.

    That’s before you account for the fallout of elevated tariffs on steel and other imports for the many companies that get their pipes and drilling equipment from overseas, said Robert Rapier, editor-in-chief of Shale Magazine, who has two decades of experience as a chemical engineer.

    The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ quarterly survey of over 130 oil and gas producers based in Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico, conducted in June, suggests the industry’s outlook is pessimistic. Nearly half of the 38 firms that responded to this question saw their firms drilling fewer wells this year than they had earlier expected.

    Survey participants could also submit comments. One executive from an exploration and production (E&P) company said, “It’s hard to imagine how much worse policies and DC rhetoric could have been for US E&P companies.” Another executive said, “The Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry. ‘Drill, baby, drill’ will not happen with this level of volatility.”

    Roughly one in three survey respondents chalked up the expectations for fewer wells to higher tariffs on steel imports. And three in four said tariffs raised the cost of drilling and completing new wells.

    “They’re getting more places to drill and they’re getting some lower royalties, but they’re also getting these tariffs that they don’t want,” Rapier said. “And the bottom line is their profits are going to suffer.”

    Earlier this month, ExxonMobil estimated that its profit in the April–June quarter will be roughly $1.5 billion lower than in the previous three months because of weaker oil and gas prices. And over in Europe, BP, Shell, and TotalEnergies issued similar warnings to investors about hits to their respective profits.

    These warnings come even as Trump has installed friendly faces to regulate the oil and gas sector, including at the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of the Interior, the latter of which manages federal lands and is gearing up to auction more oil and gas leases on those lands.

    “There’s a lot of enthusiasm for a window of opportunity to make investments. But there’s also a lot of caution about wanting to make sure that if there’s regulatory reforms, they’re going to stick,” said Kevin Book, managing director of research at ClearView Energy Partners, which produces analyses for energy companies and investors.

    The recently enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains provisions requiring four onshore and two offshore lease sales every year, lowering the minimum royalty rate to 12.5 percent from 16.67 percent and bringing back speculative leasing—when lands that don’t invite enough bids are leased for less money—that was stopped in 2022.

    “Pro-energy policies play a critical role in strengthening domestic production,” said a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute, the top US oil and gas industry group. “The new tax legislation unlocks opportunities for safe, responsible development in critical resource basins to deliver the affordable, reliable fuel Americans rely on.”

    Because about half of the federal royalties end up with the states and localities where the drilling occurs, “budgets in these oil and gas communities are going to be hit hard,” Rowland-Shea of American Progress said. Meanwhile, she said, drilling on public lands can pollute the air, raise noise levels, cause spills or leaks, and restrict movement for both people and wildlife.

    Earlier this year, Congress killed an EPA rule finalized in November that would have charged oil and gas companies for flaring excess methane from their operations.

    “Folks in the Trump camp have long said that the Biden administration was killing drilling by enforcing these regulations on speculative leasing and reining in methane pollution,” said Rowland-Shea. “And yet under Biden, we saw the highest production of oil and gas in history.”

    In fact, the top three fossil fuel producers collectively earned less during Trump’s first term than they did in either of President Barack Obama’s terms or under President Joe Biden. “It’s an irony that when Democrats are in there and they’re putting in policies to shift away from oil and gas, which causes the price to go up, that is more profitable for the oil and gas industry,” said Rapier.

    That doesn’t mean, of course, that the Trump administration’s actions won’t have long-lasting climate implications. Even though six months may be a significant amount of time in political accounting, investment decisions in the energy sector are made over longer horizons, ClearView’s Book said. As long as the planned lease sales take place, oil companies can snap up and sit on public lands until they see more favorable conditions for drilling.

    What could pad the demand for oil and gas is how the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will withdraw or dilute the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax incentives and subsidies for renewable energy sources. “With the kneecapping of wind and solar, that’s going to put a lot more pressure on fossil fuels to fill that gap,” Rowland-Shea said.

    However, the economics of solar and wind are increasingly too attractive to ignore. With electricity demand exceeding expectations, Book said, “any president looking ahead at end-user prices and power supply might revisit or take a flexible position if they find themselves facing shortage.”

    A recent United Nations report found that “solar and wind are now almost always the least expensive—and the fastest—option for new electricity generation.” That is why Texas, deemed the oil capital of the world, produces more wind power than any other state and also led the nation in new solar capacity in the last two years.

    Renewables like wind and solar, said Rowland-Shea, are “a truly abundant and American source of energy.”

    The 45 Best Shows on Netflix Right Now (August 2025)

    by: Matt Kamen, WIRED Staff

    Squid Game, Sakamoto Days, and Grace and Frankie are just a few of the shows you need to watch on Netflix this month.

    The 43 Best Shows on Netflix Right Now

    Squid Game, Sakamoto Days, and Grace and Frankie are just a few of the shows you need to watch on Netflix this month.
    GRACE  FRANKIE.  LILY TOMLIN as FRANKIE and JANE FONDA as GRACE in GRACE  FRANKIE. Cr. Saeed AdyaniNETFLIX © 2022
    Still from Grace and Frankie.Photograph: Saeed Adyani/NETFLIX

    Streaming services are known for having award-worthy series but also plenty of duds. Our guide to the best TV shows on Netflix is updated weekly to help you know which series you should move to the top of your queue. They aren’t all surefire winners—we love a good less-than-obvious gem—but they’re all worth your time, trust us.

    Feel like you’ve already watched everything on this list that you want to see? Try our guide to the best movies on Netflix for more options. And if you’ve already completed Netflix and are in need of a new challenge, check out our picks for the best shows on Hulu and the best shows on Disney+. Don’t like our picks or want to offer suggestions of your own? Head to the comments below.

    If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

    Sneaky Pete

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    Just released from prison, Marius (Giovanni Ribisi) steals the identity of former cellmate Pete Murphy in order to hide from the dangers of his old life. On the run from a vicious gangster played by Bryan Cranston (who also jointly created the show), Marius nestles in with Pete’s motley crew of estranged family. They're delighted to be reunited with their long-lost relative, but he finds taking over another man’s life might be even more dangerous than the past he’s running from. Originally an Amazon Prime series, this three-season drama can now be binged in its entirety on Netflix.

    Grace and Frankie

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    The brainchild of Friends cocreator Marta Kauffman, this sharp sitcom sees Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as the titular Grace and Frankie, longtime acquaintances forced into living together after their husbands leave them late in life—for each other. The show follows this contemporary odd couple as they deal with their ex-husbands' coming out, their adult children's drama, and each other's maddening personalities, all while building a genuine friendship and trying to prove to themselves and the world that age is just a number. Taking cues from Arrested Development, Grace and Frankie's chief comedic currency is awkwardness, as their two extended families—the rich, business-minded Hansons and the borderline hippy Bergsteins—bring their neuroses and baggage to bear while navigating adult familial relationships. Think of it as a modern-day Golden Girls—just with more swearing and drug use.

    Sakamoto Days

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    Taro Sakamoto used to be the worst of the worst, a hitman par excellence, his lethal skills making him a legendary figure in the criminal underworld. Then he fell in love, got married, and retired to run a convenience store with his wife Aoi and their daughter Hana. Unfortunately, he didn't exactly leave his old job on the best of terms, and now a cadre of killers are out for the billion yen bounty on his head. Luckily, Sakamoto's lost none of his skills—even though he's let himself go in other areas—but can he protect his family without breaking Aoi's strict "no killing" rule? Based on the manga by Yuto Suzuki, this comedy action anime is a blast. Now into its second season, with new episodes dropping each Monday, it's appointment viewing you won't want to miss.

    Sweet Tooth

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    Based on the comic book by Jeff Lemire, Sweet Tooth kicks off 10 years after “The Sick,” a viral pandemic that killed most of the population and led—somehow—to babies being born with part-human, part-animal characteristics. The series follows Gus (Christian Convery), a half-deer hybrid boy who leaves the wilderness in search of his mother, and “Big Man” Tommy Jeppard (Nonso Anozie), a grizzled traveler who becomes his reluctant guide, protecting him from surviving humans who hate and fear the hybrids. Over the course of three seasons, Gus and Jeppard are drawn into conflict with scientist Aditya Singh (Adeel Akhtar), whose research into the origins of The Sick sees him take on an almost religious obsession with Gus, all while tensions mount between the increasingly diverged species of humans and hybrids. Part sci-fi, part fantasy, part mystery, Sweet Tooth offers viewers a postapocalyptic dystopia unlike any other.

    Squid Game

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    The Korean sensation that became a global phenomenon, Squid Games blend of Hunger Games’ shocking elimination battles and Parasite’s condemnation of exploitative capitalism turned it into one of Netflix's biggest-ever hits. It started off simply enough—hundreds of desperate people recruited to compete in a series of playground games with a deadly twist, the survivor winning a ₩45.6 billion ($35.8 million) jackpot. But now, with its third and final season, the stakes are higher than ever, and even perennial survivor Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) might not be able to win this round. Intense, brutal, and frequently graphic, Squid Game remains gripping to the very end.

    Trainwreck

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    Little else is as fascinating as a real-life disaster born of sheer hubris. The strange mix of “saw that one coming” and “get the popcorn,” as you watch events unfold makes for captivating viewing. That's the special sauce for Trainwreck, Netflix's series of documentaries exploring some of the biggest, well, train wrecks of recent history. From the crack-cocaine-fueled tenure of Toronto's disgraced mayor Rob Ford to the avoidable errors that saw a luxury cruise liner turned into an infamous “poop cruise,” each installment is a fascinating exploration of how badly things can go wrong when the wrong people are in charge. Netflix oddly categorizes each Trainwreck as its own movie, but it's really a loosely connected anthology, and while some cases require their own multi-episode arcs to excavate the wreckage (shoutout to Woodstock ’99), there's no particular starting point—simply pick your favorite screw-up and just try to look away.

    The Survivors

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    Years ago, Kieran Elliott (Charlie Vickers) survived a storm that trapped him in a sea cave, but his brother Finn and friend Toby died in the rescue attempt. Fifteen years later, he returns to his hometown with his partner Mia (Yerin Ha) and their baby Audrey for a memorial, finding that everyone from neighbors to his own mother still blame him for the tragedy. While those deaths still haunt the small town community, they may also have obscured another tragedy—teenager Gabby Birch went missing the same night. Now, out-of-town investigator Bronte (Shannon Berry), the only person who still cared about the long-cold case, has wound up dead herself, and everyone in Kieran's life seems to be connected. Adapted from the novel by Jane Harper, this Australian murder mystery from Glitch creator Tony Ayres is a darkly compelling miniseries.

    Glitch

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    To those in the northern hemisphere, this Australian supernatural drama might be one of the best-kept secrets of the past decade. Centered on a small town in Victoria, an entire community is shaken when seven people rise from their graves, seemingly in perfect health but with no memory of who they are or how they died. As police sergeant James Hayes (Patrick Brammall) and local doctor Elishia McKellar (Genevieve O'Reilly) try to contain and examine “The Risen,” Hayes’ world is rocked when he learns his own late wife Kate is among them. Over the course of three seasons and 18 episodes, the reasons for the dead's return is teased out, starting with simply “how” and “why” but building up to something that questions the rules of reality. A fantastic ensemble cast and brilliant pacing make this a must-see.

    Dept. Q

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    Edinburgh police detective Carl Morck (The Crown's Matthew Goode) used to be one of the best—until his arrogance got his partner paralyzed and a uniformed officer killed, and saw him narrowly survive a bullet through his own neck. After returning to work following a lengthy period of mandatory leave, Morck finds himself heading up the new Department Q—an underfunded, under-staffed operation in the precinct's dank basement, dedicated to solving the iciest of cold cases. Gathering a team of misfits, including Rose (Leah Byrne), eager to please but recovering from a breakdown, Akram (Alexej Manvelov), a Syrian refugee, and Morck's still-bedbound partner James (Jamie Sives), the department has a lot to prove—but solving the disappearance of Merritt Linguard (Chloe Pirrie) might be a good start. Based on the novels by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen, Dept. Q is a brilliant blend of Scandi noir and gritty British crime drama.

    Sirens

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    First The White Lotus, then The Perfect Couple, and now Sirens—Meghann Fahy is making a career out of starring in shows where we get to see awfully rich people doing awfully bad things to each other. Here, she plays down-on-her-luck Devon, drawn into the luxurious world her sister Simone (Milly Alcock, imminently Supergirl) inhabits by proxy, working as an assistant to billionaire's wife Michaela (Julianne Moore). It's never clear how willingly Simone got involved with the charismatic Michaela, who may be a mentor or cult leader or something else entirely, nor how overprotective or paranoid Devon is, but the hook of this glossy, dark comedy is in finding out.

    The Eternaut

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    Juan Salvo (Ricardo Darín) was settling in for a card game with his friends. Then the snow started falling—unusual enough for Buenos Aires in the summer, and downright terrifying when everyone touched by the freak weather event drops dead. But as Salvo desperately tries to find his daughter and ex-wife among the few survivors, an even deeper horror emerges. Adapted from a beloved Argentinian comic book by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López, The Eternaut offers a unique piece of postapocalyptic drama, focusing on grounded, authentic characters before spinning off into wilder sci-fi directions.

    Blood of Zeus

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    This adult animated take on Greek mythology returns for its third and final season, bringing the odyssey of demigod Heron—son of Zeus and mortal woman Electra—to a brutal conclusion. After years of manipulation, power plays, and betrayals, the season picks up with the Olympian gods and their Titan predecessors lined up against each other, the fate of the world hanging on the outcome of the ultimate family feud. Heron and his estranged brother Seraphim may be the only ones able to bring peace—so it's rather inconvenient that Heron is dead. From start to finish, Blood of Zeus has impressed with smart writing that offers compelling twists on the classic myths, all brought to life with top-tier animation and phenomenal voice acting, and it doesn't disappoint as it reaches its finale. One of Netflix's best animated series.

    You

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    Based on the novels of Caroline Kepnes, You is an often deeply disturbing series. During the first season, bookstore manager Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) falls in deranged-love-at-first-sight with aspiring author Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail). In subsequent ones, he relocates to Los Angeles, where heiress Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) became the focus of his attention, and then to London, where he poses as an unassuming university professor before meeting his match in Kate Galvin (Charlotte Ritchie). At each turn, the globe-hopping saga of murderous obsession has become more and more unsettling. In the fifth and final season, Joe returns to New York with his new wife, Kate, but the darkness and brutality that's followed him around the world is never far behind. Often shocking, You is a gripping thriller that hits the same sinister sweet spot as early (read: good) seasons of Dexter.

    The Four Seasons

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    Three couples—lovebirds Kate and Jack (Tina Fey and Will Forte), glamorous Danny and Claude (Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani), and fraying Nick and Anne (Steve Carrell and Kerri Kenney-Silver)—have known each other since college, maintaining their decades-long friendship with a series of regular vacations together. But when Nick finally splits with Anne—who was about to surprise him with a vow renewal—the group's dynamic completely changes. It sounds like the premise for a depressing drama, but The Four Seasons is instead a surprisingly life-affirming comedy, bolstered by fantastic performances across-the-board. A loose adaptation of the 1981 movie of the same name, this eight-episode miniseries—cocreated by Fey—sometimes takes things in more farcical, physical comedy directions, but maintains a charming sense of warmth and humanity throughout.

    Black Mirror

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    Black Mirror returns with six new episodes that continue to explore humanity’s complicated relationship with technology. Although the new, seventh season includes a couple of rare sequels to previous Black Mirror episodes, the anthology format means every episode remains accessible. That means you can jump right in with the heartbreaking “Eulogy,” where Paul Giamatti's Phillip dives through his own fractured memories of a lost lover. Or you can start with the sinister “Plaything,” in which a gaming journalist gets murderously obsessed with a strange life-sim game, partly inspired by series creator Charlie Brooker’s own background. (In a very meta twist, you can play the game for real.) Whether you’re a longtime fan or this is your first encounter with poignant tech dystopias, all of Black Mirror awaits your viewing.

    North of North

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    Young Inuk woman Siaja (Anna Lambe, True Detective: Night Country) married straight out of high school, then spent years trapped in the shadow of her shallow, selfish husband, Ting—the golden boy of their small town of Ice Cove, nestled far in the Arctic Circle. A brush with death—and possibly the goddess Nuliajuk—gives her the push to make a fresh start, but an explosive breakup in a community of only 2,000 people means Siaja’s personal life is now everyone’s business. Netflix’s first Canadian original series, this sharp sitcom is packed with warmth and humor, while its on-location shooting in Iqaluit (the real-life capital of the Arctic Canadian territory of Nunavut) delivers breathtaking natural beauty along with the laughs.

    Devil May Cry

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    Building on the success of Castlevania, Netflix’s take on Capcom’s Devil May Cry series continues the streamer’s strong track record of animated video game adaptations. For those who've never picked up a controller, the series follows half-demon devil hunter Dante, a stylish slayer with a penchant for slicing up hell's worst offenders. This eight-episode spectacular sees Dante (voiced by Johnny Yong Bosch) clashing with the horrific White Rabbit (Hoon Lee), a twisted monster aiming to tear down the barrier between Earth and hell. Animation fans will also appreciate one of the final performances from the venerable, sadly-passed Kevin Conroy as the villainous US Vice President Baines. Devil May Cry may be unashamedly in love with its own early 2000s origins—as evidenced by a soundtrack filled with songs from the likes of Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach—but this slickly animated action masterpiece is a hellishly good time.

    Adolescence

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    A quiet English town. 6 am. Police raid the house of Jamie Miller on suspicion of murdering an innocent girl. Jamie is 13 years old. A shocking mini-series, this isn't a whodunit, but a whydunit. Its four episodes—each masterfully shot in a single real-time take—explore how boys are radicalized online to hate women, and the horrifying effects it has. The powerhouse cast includes cocreator and writer Stephen Graham (Bodies, A Thousand Blows) as Jamie's father Eddie, Ashley Walters (Bulletproof) as Detective Boscombe, the arresting officer and investigator of Jamie's crime, and Erin Doherty (The Crown) as the psychologist evaluating Jamie. Each brings this incredibly difficult material to life, but it's newcomer Owen Cooper as Jamie who most astounds, turning from petrified to cheeky to vitriolic in a terrifying heartbeat. Adolescence is harrowing but important viewing.

    Pantheon

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    Originally an AMC+ show, both seasons of Pantheon are now available on Netflix. Good timing too, since its nightmarish scenario of digitally uploaded human consciousnesses and exploration of the impact such technology would have on society feels worryingly prescient. With plot threads weaving between isolated Maddie Kim, whose dead father may have been reborn as an “Uploaded Intelligence,” Caspian Keyes, a genius teenager whose entire life is a Truman Show–style lie, and Vinod Chanda, an engineer investigating UI, this hard sci-fi outing—based on the short fiction of Ken Liu—offers a dark examination of virtual immortality. A uniquely brilliant adult animated series.

    Zero Day

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    Cards on the table: A significant part of the appeal here is seeing the iconic Robert De Niro in his first major English-language TV role (he previously appeared in the Argentinian Nada, aka Nothing). He doesn't disappoint with his performance as former US president George Mullen—pulled out of retirement to oversee a commission investigating a colossal cyberattack that left thousands of Americans dead and the terrifying warning that "this will happen again"—commanding the screen with his trademark gravitas. Director Lesli Linka Glatter wrings great drama from the whodunit of it all (Russians? hackers? hedge fund bros?), but with Mullen handed unprecedented powers to track down the culprits, the real nail-biting moments come from its suddenly timely explorations of abuses of power. With a powerhouse cast that includes Angela Bassett, Lizzy Caplan, and Jesse Plemons, Zero Day is an engaging political thriller, and at six episodes it makes for a great binge-watch.

    Apple Cider Vinegar

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    Influencers have been known to hawk nonsense diets and spurious “wellness” regimens, but few have ever done it like Belle Gibson, the real-life Australian influencer who went as far as faking brain cancer for attention. And while she hailed alternative diets and whole foods for keeping her nonexistent illness at bay—launching an app and cookbook in the process—actual cancer sufferers paid the price for her extreme narcissism and greed. This dramatized limited series—“a true-ish story … based on a lie,” as Netflix puts it—makes for uncomfortably gripping viewing as it charts the rise and fall of Gibson (Kaitlyn Dever, with a flawless Aussie accent) and her rivalry with Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Cary), a fellow influencer and actual cancer patient. Better than doomscrolling reels on Instagram or TikTok, and a reminder that everyone should be a lot more skeptical of anything influencers are shilling on social media.

    The Night Agent

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    Special agent Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) is back, and the stakes have never been higher. While the first season of The Night Agent wove a compelling spy drama out of the idea of a mole at the heart of America's intelligence services, the newly arrived second season takes a more global approach—Sutherland hunts down a stolen chemical weapon project, drawing him back into the orbit of tech savant and sometime love interest Rose Larkin (Luciane Buchanan), while Iranian diplomatic aide Noor Taheri (Arienne Mandi) offers secrets to the CIA in return for asylum, and a deposed Eastern European dictator aims to manipulate everything from behind bars. Sure, the show’s mix of politics and spook work won’t surprise genre diehards, but it weaves together its many influences—and many more plot threads—into a supremely entertaining thriller.

    Asura

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    The four Takezawa sisters are close but have little in common. Eldest Tsunako (Rie Miyazawa) is already a widow; repressed Takiko (Yû Aoi) and rebellious Sakiko (Suzu Hirose) are always at each other's throats; and second-born Makiko (Machiko Ono) tries to balance keeping the peace with being a housewife and mother to her own two children. Yet when Takiko learns that their father Kotaro (Jun Kunimura) may have a second, secret, family, the sisters’ bonds are put to the test as they struggle to uncover the truth. Asura is far more than a turgid family drama—it's equal parts heartwarming and hilarious, capturing the complexities of the relationships between its quartet of protagonists. Keeping the 1970s setting of Kuniko Mukōda’s original novel allows Palme d’Or– winning director Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters) to craft a gorgeously shot period piece that still feels incredibly timely and modern.

    Jentry Chau vs the Underworld

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    You know the drill—everyday teenager learns she has superpowers and is destined to fight the forces of darkness. Except Jentry Chau (voiced by Ali Wong) is not like any other teenage girl—she’s known about the supernatural her whole life (her uncontrollable fire powers were a giveaway) and spent a lifetime avoiding it. Sent to study in Korea for her own safety, Jentry is drawn back into the mystic world after being attacked in Seoul by a jiangshi named Ed (Bowen Yang). Brought back to her home in Texas by her great-aunt, Jentry has to survive not only the formidable mogui Mr. Cheng, who intends to drain her soul and powers, but the horrors of high school, culture shock, and the pain of her own past. Taking the “high school is hell” metaphor of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, adding a dash of Gravity Falls’ mystery, and rooting it all in Asian mythology, Jentry Chau vs the Underworld is one of Netflix’s freshest animated shows in years.

    No Good Deed

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    Take Selling Sunset and add a grisly tragicomic twist and you just about have No Good Deed. A dark comedy from Liz Feldman, creator of Dead to Me, this eight-part series starts with Lydia and Paul Morgan (Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano) putting their gorgeous home on the market, and descends into darker territory as prospective buyers go to ever more desperate attempts to get their hands on the house, nosy neighbors interfere, and the grisly history of the house itself threatens to come to light. Buoyed by a stellar cast including Teyonah Parris, Abbi Jacobson, Luke Wilson, and Denis Leary, this is a glossy, witty, and possibly only slightly exaggerated take on the brutality of the Los Angeles property market.

    A Man on the Inside

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    The latest show from comedy mastermind Michael Schur (The Good Place, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), A Man on the Inside features Ted Danson as Charles Nieuwendyk, a retired engineering professor who's lost all direction since his wife passed. But when private investigator Julie Kovalenko (Lilah Richcreek Estrada) needs a man of his demographic to go undercover in a retirement community to investigate allegations of resident abuse, Charles may find an unlikely new lease on life—if he can figure out how to use his smartphone, that is. Reflecting on end-of-life realities as much as it plays up Charles' fish-out-of-water situation, it's a show that's equal parts poignant, melancholic, and achingly funny—and it's based on a true story, to boot.

    Black Doves

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    Helen Webb (Keira Knightley) is wife to the UK defense secretary, mother to two children, and bored with her picture-perfect life. Spectacular cover then, since she's actually a spy for the mercenary organization Black Doves, selling state secrets to the highest bidder. But when her real love Jason (Andrew Koji) is killed, Helen is determined to find out who killed him and why—and her pursuit of the truth threatens both her public and private lives. Paired with assassin and old friend Sam (Ben Whishaw, in a very different spy role to his turn in the James Bond films) at the behest of stern operator Mrs. Reed (Sarah Lancashire), Helen's obsession could have led to a dour, gritty thriller, but Black Doves bucks the grim-dark trend to serve up a pulpy, colorful outing with enough heart to balance its violence. At only six episodes (with a second season already confirmed), it's a brisk watch too.

    Arcane

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    Animated series based on video games can run the gamut from cheap cash-ins to half-decent if forgettable tie-ins, inaccessible to anyone but hardcore devotees. Yet Arcane stood out by making its connections to Riot Games' League of Legends almost optional. While its central figures, orphaned sisters Vi and Jinx, are playable characters in the game, this steampunk saga of class war, civil uprising, and the people caught in between is entirely accessible. The second and final season, released in a trio of movie-length blocks of three episodes apiece, escalates the conflict between the warring factions but never loses its central focus on the fractured relationship between sisters. With a gorgeous painterly art style, strong characters, and frequently shocking story beats, Arcane is one of the best animated series in years—and it has racked up plenty of awards, including a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program, to prove it.

    Cobra Kai

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    Picking up decades after Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence’s iconic fight at the end of the first Karate Kid movie, Cobra Kai initially follows a washed-up Johnny as he reopens the Cobra Kai karate dojo, finding new purpose after defending his young neighbor Miguel (Xolo Maridueña, Blue Beetle) in a fight. Over the course of six seasons, the stakes get higher—and frankly, increasingly, gloriously, ludicrous—as rival martial arts schools start cropping up all over California. Alliances are forged and broken with alarming regularity, and everything gears toward a global battle for karate supremacy. It’s all a little bit tongue-in-cheek, and with Ralph Macchio and William Zabka reprising their 1980s roles, the show is an unabashed love letter to the classic action flicks, but thanks to some seriously impressive fights and stunt work, it’s a retro-styled delight.

    Heartstopper

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    One of the most joyful shows on Netflix returns for another school year of teen drama and heartfelt queer romance. In the long-awaited third season, things heat up between the central couple, with Charlie (Joe Locke) preparing to say three little words to Nick (Kit Connor) for the first time, while Elle (Yasmin Finney) and Tao (William Gao) try to have the perfect romantic summer before Elle starts art college. Heartstopper's return also sheds some of its earlier cloying tendencies, growing up alongside its talented young cast and giving them more serious material to work with, tackling more mature themes of sex, eating disorders, and gender dysphoria—all without losing the warmth and charm that made audiences fall in love with the show in the first place. The show younger LGBTQ+ viewers need now, older ones needed years ago, and one that everyone needs to watch, whatever their sexuality.

    The Boyfriend

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    "Anyone can fall in love with anyone" is the opening narration to The Boyfriend, Japan's first same-sex dating show—a bold and progressive statement that reflects the shifting tide of opinion in the country. Throwing nine single men together in an idyllic beach house for a summer and charging them with running a coffee truck, the over-arching concept is to see who'll pair up, but the series is as interested in exploring the friendships that emerge between the cast as it is the romantic relationships. Unlike Western dating shows, there are no scandals, no dramatic twists, no betrayals, and the “challenges” are adorably focused on confessing feelings. The gentleness of it all adds an almost relaxing quality, with the men discussing their emotions—and the nature of being queer in Japan—earnestly. An absolutely joyful example of reality TV.

    Kleo

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    If you’re pining for more Killing Eve, then this German thriller may be the next best thing. Set in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the series follows the eponymous Kleo (Jella Haase), a Stasi assassin imprisoned by her agency on false treason charges. Released after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she seeks revenge on her former handlers—but West German detective Sven (Dimitrij Schaad), the only witness to her last kill, may have something to say about that. As dark and violent as you'd expect given the period and the themes of betrayal and vengeance, Kleo is lightened by its oft-deranged sense of humor and a charismatic lead duo who brilliantly bounce off one another—chemistry that's only heightened in the second season as Kleo's pursuit of her old allies intensifies, attracting attention from international spy agencies in the aftermath of the Cold War.

    Sweet Home

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    Based on the Korean webcomic by Kim Carnby and Hwang Young-chan, Sweet Home offers a very different vision of apocalyptic end times—rather than pandemics, disasters, or even zombies, this posits an end of the world brought about by people's transformation into grotesque monsters, each unique and seemingly based on their deepest desires when they were human. The first season is a masterclass in claustrophobic horror, as the residents of an isolated, run-down apartment building—chiefly suicidal teen Cha Hyun-su (Song Kang), former firefighter Seo Yi-kyung (Lee Si-young), and Pyeon Sang-wook (Lee Jin-wook), who may be a brutal gangster—battle for survival. The second and third seasons explore what remains of the wider world, delving into the true nature of both monster and man—and if there's any hope for what remains of humanity. With phenomenal effects work blending prosthetics, CGI, and even stop-motion animation for some disturbingly juddering creatures, this stands apart from the horror crowd.

    Star Trek Prodigy

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    Paramount+'s loss remains Netflix's gain, as the streamer's license rescue of this great Star Trek spin-off warps into its second season. After escaping a distant prison planet and becoming Starfleet cadets under the watchful eye of Star Trek Voyager's Admiral Janeway (voiced by the venerable Kate Mulgrew), the ragtag crew—led by aspiring captain Dal R'El and bolstered by astrolinguist Gwyndala, engineer Jankom Pog, energy being Zero, scientist Rok-Tahk, and indestructible, gelatinous Murf—find themselves cast through time on the most dangerous mission of their young lives. While aimed at younger audiences and intended as an intro to the wider Trek universe and its ethics, Prodigy packs in plenty for older Trekkers to appreciate, particularly with a slate of returning Star Trek legends voiced by their original actors. Prodigy is something of a sleeper hit, but one of the best Trek shows in years.

    Supacell

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    One by one, five Black Londoners awaken to strange superpowers. Struggling father Andre (Eric Kofi-Abrefa) develops superstrength, nurse Sabrina (Nadine Mills) unleashes phenomenal telekinetic might, drug dealer Rodney (Calvin Demba) races at superspeed, and wannabe gang leader Tazer (Josh Tedeku) turns invisible. But it's Michael (Tosin Cole, Doctor Who) who may be the most pivotal, realizing he can leap through time and space and learning he only has three months to save his fiancée's life. Created by Andrew “Rapman” Onwubolu, Supacell is a show about superpowers, but not necessarily superheroes, with its fantastic cast offering up a far more realistic and human exploration of now-familiar ideas than anything you'll find in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And the mystery of why—and how—only Black people seem to be gaining powers builds up to a more powerful punch than an Asgardian god of thunder. A smart, modern, and refreshing take on the genre.

    The Good Place

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    After suffering an improbable and humiliating death, Eleanor (Kristen Bell) finds herself in “The Good Place,” a perfect neighborhood inhabited by the world's worthiest people. The only problem? She's not meant to be there. Desperate to not be sent to “The Bad Place,” she tries to correct her behavior in the afterlife, with the help of her assigned soulmate, philosophy professor Chidi (William Jackson Harper). A twist at the end of the first season remains one of the best ever, while the show's ability to sprinkle ethical and philosophical precepts into a sitcom format is frankly astounding. With a sensational cast rounded out by Manny Jacinto, Jameela Jamil, D'Arcy Carden, and Ted Danson, The Good Place more than earns its place in the good place of TV history.

    3 Body Problem

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    In 1960s China, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, gifted scholar Wenjie Ye witnesses her physicist father being beaten to death for his research, only for her to be recruited to a secret project relying on that same knowledge. Fast-forward to the present day, and physics is broken: Particle accelerators around the world are delivering impossible data, while scientists are being plagued by countdowns only they can see. Meanwhile, strange VR headsets appear to be transporting players to an entirely different world—and humanity’s continued existence may rely on there being no “game over.” Game of Thrones’ creators D. B. Weiss and David Benioff and True Blood executive producer Alexander Woo reimagine Chinese author Cixin Liu’s acclaimed hard sci-fi trilogy of first contact and looming interplanetary conflict as a more global affair. Wildly ambitious, and boasting an international cast featuring the likes of Benedict Wong, Rosalind Chao, Eiza González, and GOT alum John Bradley, Netflix's 3 Body Problem serves up the opening salvo in a richly detailed and staggeringly complex saga.

    Ripley

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    Perhaps best known nowadays from 1999’s The Talented Mr. Ripley starring Matt Damon, novelist Patricia Highsmith’s inveterate criminal Tom Ripley has a longer, darker legacy in print and on the screen. For this limited series, creator Steven Zaillian goes back to Highsmith's original text, presenting Ridley (a never-more-sinister Andrew Scott of All of Us Strangers) as a down-on-his-luck con man in 1950s New York who is recruited by a wealthy shipbuilder to travel to Italy and persuade the businessman’s spoiled son Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) to return home. But once in Italy, Ripley finds himself enamored with Dickie's lavish lifestyle—and will do anything to take it for himself. Shot in black and white to really sell its noir credentials, this is an instant contender for the finest interpretation of Highsmith's works to date.

    Beef

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    Ever been cut off in traffic? Ever had it happen when you’re having a really bad day? Ever just wanted to take the low road, chase the person down and make them pay?! Then—after a few deep breaths—Beef is the show for you. It's a pressure valve for every petty grievance you’ve ever suffered, following rich Amy (Ali Wong) and struggling Danny (Steven Yeun) as they escalate a road rage encounter into a vengeance-fueled quest to destroy the other. Yet Beef is more than a city-wide revenge thriller—it's a biting look at how crushing modern life can be, particularly in its LA setting, where extravagant wealth brushes up against inescapable poverty and seemingly no one is truly happy. Part dramedy, part therapy, Beef is a bad example of conflict resolution but a cathartic binge watch that clearly resonates—as evidenced by its growing clutch of awards, including the Golden Globe for Best Limited Series.

    Loudermilk

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    Something of a sleeper hit for years—its first two seasons debuted on AT&T's now-defunct pay TV channel Audience in 2017, before its third season appeared over on Amazon—all three seasons of this bleak comedy are now available on Netflix. Ron Livingston stars as Sam Loudermilk, a vitriolic former music critic and recovering alcoholic who proves almost pathologically incapable of holding his tongue when faced with life's small frustrations—a personality type possibly ill-suited to leading others through addiction support groups. It's dark in places, and its central character is deliberately unlikeable, but smart writing and smarter performances shape this into something of an acerbic anti-Frasier.

    Scott Pilgrim Takes Off

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    Adapted from the beloved graphic novel series by Bryan Lee O'Malley, animated by one of the most exciting and dynamic studios in Japan, and voiced by the entire returning cast of director Edgar Wright's 2010 live-action adaption, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off would have been cult gold even if it was a straight retelling of its eponymous slacker's battles against lover Ramona Flowers' seven evil exes. Yet somehow, in a world devoid of surprises, this packs in killer twists from the very first episode, making for a show that's as fresh and exciting as ever. Saying anything else would ruin it—just watch.

    Blue Eye Samurai

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    In the 17th Century, Japan enforced its "sakoku" isolationist foreign policy, effectively closing itself off from the world. Foreigners were few and far between—so when Mizu (voiced by Maya Erskine) is born with blue eyes, nine months after her mother was assaulted by one of the four white men in the country, it marks her as an outsider, regarded as less than human. Years later, after being trained by a blind sword master and now masquerading as a man, Mizu hunts down those four men, knowing that killing them all is the only way to guarantee her vengeance. Exquisitely animated—which makes its unabashed violence all the more graphic—and with a phenomenal voice cast bolstered by the likes of George Takei, Brenda Song, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and Kenneth Branagh, Blue Eye Samurai is one of the best adults-only animated series on Netflix.

    Pending Train

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    Netflix: License one of Japan’s best SF dramas in years. Also Netflix: Do nothing, literally nothing, to promote it, not even create an English subbed trailer. Which is where WIRED comes in—Pending Train is a show you (and Netflix) shouldn’t sleep on. When a train carriage is mysteriously transported into a post-apocalyptic future, the disparate passengers’ first concern is simply survival. Between exploring their new surroundings and clashing with people from another stranded train car over scarce resources, one group—including hairdresser Naoya, firefighter Yuto, and teacher Sae—begins to realize that there may be a reason they’ve been catapulted through time: a chance to go back and avert the disaster that ruined the world. A tense, 10-episode journey, Pending Train offers a Japanese twist on Lost, but one with tighter pacing and showrunners who actually have a clue where they want the story to go.

    One Piece

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    Mark one up for persistence: After numerous anime adaptations ranging from “awful” to “not too bad,” Netflix finally strikes gold with its live-action take on the global phenomenon One Piece. Despite fans’ fears, this spectacularly captures the charm, optimism, and glorious weirdness of Eiichiro Oda’s beloved manga, manifesting a fantasy world where people brandish outlandish powers and hunt for a legendary treasure in an Age of Piracy almost verbatim from the page. The perfectly cast Iñaki Godoy stars as Monkey D. Luffy, would-be King of the Pirates, bringing an almost elastic innate physicality to the role that brilliantly matches the characters rubber-based stretching powers, while the crew Luffy gathers over this first season—including swordsmaster Roronoa Zoro (Mackenyu), navigator and skilled thief Nami (Emily Rudd), sharpshooter Usopp (Jacob Romero Gibson), and martial artist chef Sanji (Taz Skylar)—all brilliantly embody their characters. A lot could have gone wrong bringing One Piece to life, but this is a voyage well worth taking.

    The Chosen One

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    Based on the comic American Jesus by writer Mark Millar (Kick-Ass, Kingsman) and artist Peter Gross (Lucifer), The Chosen One follows 12-year-old Jodie (Bobby Luhnow), raised in Mexico by his mother Sarah (Dianna Agron). While the young boy would rather hang out with his friends, his life—and potentially the world—changes forever when he starts exhibiting miraculous powers, attracting dangerous attention from sinister forces. While this could have been yet another formulaic entry in Netflix's expansive library of supernatural teen dramas (the Stranger Things vibe is particularly strong), the decision to shoot on film and in a 4:3 aspect ratio make this a visual delight, unlike almost anything else on the streamer at present. There's an English dub, but stick to the original Spanish with English subs for a better viewing experience. (Confusingly, there's another show with the exact same title on Netflix, a 2019 Brazilian series following a trio of relief doctors in a village dominated by a cult leader—also worth a watch, but don't get them confused!)

    Google Will Use AI to Guess People’s Ages Based on Search History

    by: Dell Cameron

    Plus: A former top US cyber official loses her new job due to political backlash, Congress is rushing through a bill to censor lawmakers’ personal information online, and more.

    Security News This Week: Google Will Use AI to Guess People’s Ages Based on Search History

    Plus: A former top US cyber official loses her new job due to political backlash, Congress is rushing through a bill to censor lawmakers’ personal information online, and more.
    Image may contain Logo Symbol Art and Photography
    Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff/Getty Images

    Last week, the United Kingdom began requiring residents to verify their ages before accessing online pornography and other adult content, all in the name of protecting children. Almost immediately, things did not go as planned—although, they did go as expected.

    As experts predicted, UK residents began downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) en masse, allowing them to circumvent age verification, which can require users to upload their government IDs, by making it look like they’re in a different country. The UK’s Online Safety Act is just one part of a wave of age-verification efforts around the world. And while these laws may keep some kids from accessing adult content, some experts warn that they also create security and privacy risks for everyone.

    Russia’s state-backed hacking group Turla is known for its bold, creative attacks, such as masking their communications via satellite or piggybacking on other hackers’ attacks to avoid detection. The group, which is part of the Russian FSB intelligence agency, is now using its access to the country’s internet providers to trick foreign officials into downloading spyware that breaks encryption, allowing Turla’s hackers to access their private information.

    And that’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

    Google Will Start Estimating Your Age Based on Browsing Data

    Google is rolling out an AI-powered age-estimation system to apply content protections to Search and YouTube, even for users who haven’t provided their age. The system is launching in the EU, where digital safety regulations mandate that platforms take steps to protect minors from potentially harmful content.

    Instead of relying solely on user-input data, Google says it will infer age using a “variety of signals” and other metadata to determine if a user should be shown restricted results. Privacy advocates say the move risks inaccuracies and raises questions about transparency and consent.

    Google claims the changes align with regulatory expectations and will help protect younger users from inappropriate content. Still, the idea that platforms can algorithmically infer personal traits like age—and restrict content based solely on those assumptions—adds a new wrinkle to long-standing debates over moderation, censorship, and digital privacy.

    Army Revokes Former CISA Director’s West Point Appointment After Political Backlash

    Just 24 hours after naming Jen Easterly as West Point’s Distinguished Chair in Social Sciences, the Army rescinded the appointment following far-right criticism. The former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director and academy alum had been lauded for her decades of service. But backlash erupted online after activist Laura Loomer claimed Easterly had ties to the Biden-era Disinformation Governance Board.

    Nina Jankowicz, who served as executive director of the board, denied having worked with Easterly in a post on BlueSky, calling the episode yet another example of how we’re all living in “the stupidest timeline.”

    Nevertheless, Army secretary Dan Driscoll canceled Easterly’s contract and ordered a full review of West Point’s hiring policies. The Army also suspended the practice of allowing outside groups to help select faculty. The reversal marks the second high-profile clash involving former CISA leaders and political pressure following Donald Trump’s revocation of Chris Krebs’ security clearance earlier this year.

    Congress Fast-Tracks Bill Letting Lawmakers Censor Info About Their Homes and Travel

    A bipartisan bill from US senators Amy Klobuchar and Ted Cruz could let lawmakers demand the removal of online posts showing their home addresses or travel plans, Rolling Stone reports. The proposal, which could pass by unanimous consent, is framed as a response to growing threats against public officials—especially after the assassination of Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman last month.

    Watchdogs joined dozens of media outlets in warning that the bill could chill reporting and enable selective censorship. While the legislation includes a nominal exemption for journalists, critics say it remains vague enough to allow members of Congress to sue outlets or demand takedowns of legitimate news stories.

    “The Cruz-Klobuchar bill would not provide [lawmakers] the protection they seek but would create a powerful new tool that would result in censorship of public discussion and press accountability for their actions,” Daniel Schuman of the American Governance Institute told Rolling Stone. He urged Congress to go “back to the drawing board” and try crafting a bill that protects all Americans’ privacy “without undermining accountability for public officials.”

    Google Bug Let People Quietly Censor Articles From Search

    An alarming vulnerability in Google’s Refresh Outdated Content tool allowed bad actors to selectively scrub individual URLs from search results, 404 Media reports. And there was no hacking required. Journalist Jack Poulson discovered the bug when two of his investigative pieces, including one about a tech CEO’s domestic violence arrest, vanished from Google, even when searched by exact title in quotes.

    The exploit involved repeatedly submitting URLs with minor capitalization tweaks. This reportedly confused Google’s indexing engine, which responded by de-listing not just the altered URLs but the original live articles too. Google confirmed the flaw and quietly rolled out a fix, saying it impacted only a “tiny fraction of web pages.”

    Free press advocates warn the vulnerability could’ve enabled targeted, silent censorship, especially by powerful actors using reputation management tactics. “If your article doesn’t appear in Google search results,” Poulson said, “in many ways it just doesn’t exist.”

    11 Best Coolers WIRED Tested for Every Budget, Any Situation (2025)

    by: Louryn Strampe

    We chugged chilled beverages to bring you our favorite coolers for every situation.

    The 11 Best Coolers We’ve Tested for Every Kind of Adventure

    We tested coolers on camping trips, road trips, beach days, and at parties to bring you our favorite models for every situation.

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    Featured in this article
    Best for Most People
    Yeti Tundra Haul
    Read more
    Best for Less Money
    RTIC Ultra-Tough Cooler
    Read more
    Best Affordable Cooler
    Igloo Wheelie Cooler
    Read more
    Another Great Rolling Cooler
    Yeti Roadie 32
    Read more
    Show more
    4 / 11

    Others We Tested

    Photograph: Simon Hill

    Anker Solix EverFrost 2 for $649: Anker’s Solix EverFrost 2 electric cooler comes in three sizes (24, 42, or 61 quarts) and has wheels, a handle, and a wee fold-out shelf to sit drinks on. The largest model has two separate cooler sections (you can have a fridge and freezer). Since there’s no need for ice, you can make full use of the space. It’s quick to cool, giving you drinkable beer in 20 minutes. The removable 288 Wh battery is good for around 52 hours for the 42-quart model, but you can add a second battery ($250) to extend that to 4.3 days. Anker makes some of our favorite power banks and power stations, so I’m not surprised its Solix EverFrost 2 cooler doubles up as a charger for your gadgets, though that will eat into your battery life. You can recharge the cooler battery via a wall outlet, car socket, solar panels, or USB-C. Paired with a 100-watt solar panel, this could be a great way to go off-grid (you’ll need around four hours of sunshine a day minimum to keep it running). On the downside, the Solix EverFrost 2 can also run out of power fairly quickly, depending on how warm it is and how often you open it. Because of the battery, these coolers are heavy. The 42-quart model is 51 pounds empty, so you’ll want help lifting it in and out of your car when fully loaded, though the handy wheels make it easy to maneuver on the ground. It can also be a little noisy, which might be annoying if you’re sleeping in a tent with it. —Simon Hill

    How to Buy a Cooler

    The first thing to consider when buying a cooler is how you're going to use it. If you aren't heading out for days at a time, you probably don't need an expensive high-end cooler. All the coolers we've recommend above are capable of holding things at a safe temperature for a day, provided you keep them in the shade. Similarly, if you're navigating rugged terrain, you might want beefy wheels—and if you're just going to the beach, you might not need them.

    Hard-sided coolers: These range from the old green Coleman coolers—once a staple of every camping trip—to Yetis, which cost as much as cars did when Coleman started making coolers. You might wonder why the Yetis are so expensive. That I can't answer, but Yeti did upend the cooler industry by introducing rotational molding, or “rotomolding,” where melted plastic is molded over foam insulation in one piece. Rotomolded coolers offer seamless, uniform density in their walls and lids, which drastically improves a cooler's performance. In contrast, those ancient, affordable plastic coolers we've all used have thinner walls, leaky seams, and less insulated lids. Whether you need the extra insulation depends on what you're doing and how hot it is when you're doing it. Want to learn more? Our In-House Know-It-All has a more thorough insulation explanation.

    Hard-sided coolers generally have the luxury features you want, like leakproof lids and drain plugs, and some are even bear-resistant (check this list of bear-proof products if you're headed into ursine country). The downside is that these coolers are generally huge and heavy.

    Soft-sided coolers: Soft-sided coolers include everything from well-padded, impressively insulated sling bags (like the Yeti Hopper Flip above) to roll-down, dry-bag-style coolers perfect for those mild beach days. The best soft coolers are easier to carry, pack away easily when not in use, and have a versatility that traditional hard coolers lack. (I have used dry-bag-style coolers as, well, dry bags.) Ice doesn't last as long, but for short outings where you don't need a large cooler, these are what we recommend.

    Electric coolers: Sure, they're not necessary, but if you're headed out on longer adventures and have access to power, you'll never have to worry about your ice melting.

    Other Features to Look For:

    • Drain plug: This greatly simplifies life by making it easy to drain the water out of your cooler. If you're buying a large cooler, make sure it has one of these.
    • Divider: One of our top tips for long-term cooler use is to have two coolers: One you treat as a fridge and hardly ever open, and another for drinks. If that's not possible, you can achieve some of the same by getting a cooler with a dividing wall in it. That way you can pack one side tightly with ice to keep that meat at a low temp, and use the other side for chilling beverages with cubed ice.
    • Wheels: Coolers get heavy and wheels are awesome. They won't always work (good luck wheeling your cooler over tree roots), but when they do, they are completely worth it.

    Cooler Tips

    If you're storing your cooler in a 160-degree-Fahrenheit car trunk, no rotomolded wall or freezer gasket will keep ice from melting. But if you want to maximize your cooling time like the pros, we do have a few tips.

    Pre-chill your cooler: Pack it with ice a few hours before packing, so your cooler starts out the trip freezing cold.

    Keep two separate coolers: One that you open infrequently to hold perishables like meat and cheese, and one for snacks and drinks that you open more frequently.

    Pack strategically: Put larger items and ice packs at the bottom to keep any small chunks of ice cooler for longer.

    Block it: Block ice is more efficient for long-term cooling because it has less surface area to mass. Use a block or two to either to supplement your cubed ice or as a replacement for it entirely.

    How We Tested and What’s Up Next

    We tested coolers by using them during camping trips, road trips, beach days, tailgating parties, and (in one unfortunate instance) as a replacement for a broken refrigerator. We are currently re-testing picks with a new protocol. Up next, we're checking out patio coolers, electric coolers, disposable coolers, and backpack coolers from Igloo, Dometic, Coleman, and other brands.

    Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting and exclusive subscriber content that's too important to ignore. Subscribe Today.

    Gear News of the Week: Insta360 Debuts a Drone Company, and DJI Surprises With an 8K 360 Camera

    by: Julian Chokkattu

    Plus: Netgear has an affordable Wi-Fi 7 mesh system, Samsung’s latest Galaxy Z Fold series is a hit, and Google’s Pixel 10 leaks heat up.

    Gear News of the Week: Insta360 Debuts a Drone Company, and DJI Surprises With an 8K 360 Camera

    Plus: Netgear has an affordable Wi-Fi 7 mesh system, Samsung’s latest Galaxy Z Fold series is a hit, and Google’s Pixel 10 leaks heat up.
    Image may contain Electronics Accessories and Glasses
    Courtesy of Antigravity

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    The 360 camera company Insta360 has entered the drone market with a spin-off brand called Antigravity. This new company hasn't released a drone yet, but it's coming soon and will likely have a slightly different take from current market leaders like DJI. Antigravity's drone is expected to feature 360 cameras with 8K resolution. It will also fall under the 250-gram weight limit, meaning it won't require a license.

    The 360-degree camera makes sense from the company that makes our favorite 360 camera, though the usefulness of shooting straight up into the drone is questionable. Think of it as a 360 camera with about 260 degrees of usable footage. This isn't a new idea. There are mounts to attach Insta360's X5 camera to drones, but it's awkward to take off and land such pairings, something Antigravity's drone will likely simplify.

    Antigravity's new drone should arrive later this month. We'll have a full review once we've had time to test it out. —Scott Gilbertson

    DJI Unveils a 360 Camera

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    Ironically, as Insta360 encroaches on DJI's drone supremacy, DJI is wading into the world of 360 cameras with its first-ever Osmo 360. It can capture 8K video at 50 frames per second, slightly outpacing Insta360's X5 camera, which shoots 8K at 30 fps. The Osmo employs a square 1-inch HDR sensor, can connect directly to DJI's wireless microphones using OsmoAudio, and maintains the Osmo Magnetic Quick-Release system for quick mounting.

    More interestingly, DJI claims the Osmo 360 can shoot 8K video at 30 fps for 100 minutes, which is a full 20 minutes longer than the Insta360 X5. It also only weighs 183 grams, 17 grams lighter than its top competitor. You can shoot with just a single lens at 4K 120 fps, and you can switch between the front and rear lens without pressing pause.

    The Osmo 360 isn't launching in the US (yet), but it costs $550 and is available globally. Like DJI's Mavic 4 Pro drone, those in the US can still preorder it from retailers like B&H and Adorama.

    Netgear Announces Entry-Level Wi-Fi 7 Mesh System

    Courtesy of Netgear

    The first wave of Wi-Fi 7 mesh systems was seriously expensive, but they’ve been getting steadily more affordable. Netgear’s latest release is the Orbi 370 Series, an entry-level, dual-band Wi-Fi 7 mesh. While you only get the familiar 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz bands, not the 6-GHz band, you do get some of the other advantages of Wi-Fi 7, including enhanced security, lower latency, and multi-link operation (MLO), enabling you to connect on both bands simultaneously. MLO works for backhaul, too, which is the traffic between the main router and nodes.

    The 370 has the same vase-like design as the rest of the Orbi line, but these mesh units are a bit smaller. The main Orbi 370 router has two-2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports, while the nodes have a single 2.5-Gbps port apiece. This system is suitable for folks with limited devices and internet connections up to 1 Gbps. I’m a big fan of the next system up, the Netgear Orbi 770 Series, and that’s what I recommend for families. Like with every other Orbi system, you can subscribe to Netgear Armor ($100/year) for enhanced security and add VPN and ad-blocking for an extra $50 and Smart Parental Controls ($70/year), but you don’t need to.

    You can pick up an Orbi 370 Series 3-pack for $350, a 2-pack is $250, and you can add extra nodes later for $150 each. —Simon Hill

    Samsung’s Latest Galaxy Z Fold Series Is Popular

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    It's been a week since Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold7 and Galaxy Z Flip7 hit the market, and the company has shared some interesting sales figures. Chiefly, Samsung claims the Galaxy Z Fold7 received “the most preorders in Z Fold history in the US.”

    Both devices also saw more than a 25 percent increase in preorders over the Galaxy Z Fold6 series, and carrier stores in the US claim a nearly 60 percent jump for both phones over the 2024 models. It's not just preorders either—Samsung says momentum for both Fold and Flip orders are outpacing the prior generation by 25 percent. Interestingly, Samsung says while black is the typical color of choice for its Fold consumers, this time around, its new Blue Shadow color ate up nearly half of all preorders.

    The Galaxy Z Fold7 and Flip7 series saw some of the biggest changes to the hardware in a few years. The Fold7 debuted an incredibly slim frame, making it lightweight and easy to hold, and the Flip7 bumped the screen size for the cover screen to make it more useful. The primary camera on the Fold7 also sports 200 megapixels, finally matching the quality available on Samsung's flagship Galaxy S25 Ultra.

    While the market is still small, especially in the US, where there are fewer players, Google is expected to debut its third-gen folding phone at an event in August, and Apple is rumored to be launching a folding iPhone in September 2026.

    Google Pixel 10 Leaks Heat Up

    Courtesy of Evleaks

    Google will be unwrapping its shiny new Pixel hardware at an event in Brooklyn, New York City, on August 20. But many of the details have already been spoiled. We're expecting four phones—Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, Pixel 10 Pro XL, and Pixel 10 Pro Fold—the Pixel Watch 4, and new Pixel Buds wireless earbuds. The latest leak this week comes from Android Headlines, and there's good news: Prices appear to be the same as last year's Pixel 9 series. The only change is for the Pixel 10 Pro XL at $1,199—Google seems to be getting rid of the 128-GB version, so it'll be more expensive, though technically it'll cost the same as the 256-GB version of its predecessor.

    There's also potentially confirmation via a leaked image that the Pixel 10 series will feature magnets built into the phone itself, enabling Qi2 wireless charging. The Qi2 standard is akin to Apple’s MagSafe system, which uses magnets to align phones to chargers for more efficient and faster wireless charging. The standard has been a bit of a mess, though, as Android phone companies have been slow to adopt Qi2. Samsung’s 2025 flagships, for example, are Qi2 Ready, which means there are no magnets baked into the phones, but they can hit Qi2 charging speeds if you use a Qi2 Ready case with magnets. A half-measure.

    Noted leaker evleaks released several spec details about the phones along with an image of a Pixel 10 and a wireless charging puck attached to it, much like Apple's MagSafe wireless charger. Considering there doesn't seem to be a case on the Pixel 10 in the render, this suggests that magnets are built in. That would make the Pixel 10 series the first mainstream Android phones with MagSafe-like capabilities. (HMD’s Skyline was technically the first Qi2 Android phone.)

    Anthropic Revokes OpenAI's Access to Claude

    by: Kylie Robison

    OpenAI lost access to the Claude API this week after Anthropic claimed the company was violating its terms of service.

    Anthropic Revokes OpenAI's Access to Claude

    OpenAI lost access to the Claude API this week after Anthropic claimed the company was violating its terms of service.
    Image may contain Electronics Mobile Phone Phone Art and Paper
    Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff/Getty Images

    Anthropic revoked OpenAI’s API access to its models on Tuesday, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell WIRED. OpenAI was informed that its access was cut off due to violating the terms of service.

    “Claude Code has become the go-to choice for coders everywhere, and so it was no surprise to learn OpenAI's own technical staff were also using our coding tools ahead of the launch of GPT-5,” Anthropic spokesperson Christopher Nulty said in a statement to WIRED. “Unfortunately, this is a direct violation of our terms of service.”

    According to Anthropic’s commercial terms of service, customers are barred from using the service to “build a competing product or service, including to train competing AI models” or “reverse engineer or duplicate” the services. This change in OpenAI’s access to Claude comes as the ChatGPT-maker is reportedly preparing to release a new AI model, GPT-5, which is rumored to be better at coding.

    OpenAI was plugging Claude into its own internal tools using special developer access (APIs), instead of using the regular chat interface, according to sources. This allowed the company to run tests to evaluate Claude’s capabilities in things like coding and creative writing against its own AI models, and check how Claude responded to safety-related prompts involving categories like CSAM, self-harm, and defamation, the sources say. The results help OpenAI compare its own models’ behavior under similar conditions and make adjustments as needed.

    “It’s industry standard to evaluate other AI systems to benchmark progress and improve safety. While we respect Anthropic’s decision to cut off our API access, it’s disappointing considering our API remains available to them,” OpenAI’s chief communications officer Hannah Wong said in a statement to WIRED.

    Nulty says that Anthropic will “continue to ensure OpenAI has API access for the purposes of benchmarking and safety evaluations as is standard practice across the industry.” The company did not respond to WIRED’s request for clarification on if and how OpenAI's current Claude API restriction would impact this work.

    Top tech companies yanking API access from competitors has been a tactic in the tech industry for years. Facebook did the same to Twitter-owned Vine (which led to allegations of anticompetitive behavior) and last month Salesforce restricted competitors from accessing certain data through the Slack API. This isn’t even a first for Anthropic. Last month, the company restricted the AI coding startup Windsurf’s direct access to its models after it was rumored OpenAI was set to acquire it. (That deal fell through).

    Anthropic’s chief science officer Jared Kaplan spoke to TechCrunch at the time about revoking Windsurf’s access to Claude, saying, “I think it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI.”

    A day before cutting off OpenAI’s access to the Claude API, Anthropic announced new rate limits on Claude Code, its AI-powered coding tool, citing explosive usage and, in some cases, violations of its terms of service.

    Tesla Found Partly Liable in 2019 Autopilot Death

    by: Aarian Marshall

    A Miami jury has ordered the automaker to pay up to $243 million after finding that the Tesla vehicle had a “defect.” It's the first time Tesla has been found liable in an Autopilot-related crash.

    Tesla Found Partly Liable in 2019 Autopilot Death

    A Miami jury has ordered the automaker to pay up to $243 million after finding that the Tesla vehicle had a “defect.” It's the first time Tesla has been found liable in an Autopilot-related crash.
    Image may contain Logo Emblem Symbol Blade Razor and Weapon
    Photograph: Alex Martin/Getty Images

    A Miami jury found Tesla partially liable Friday in a 2019 crash that killed one person and injured another—all while the driver of the Model S used the automaker’s Autopilot driver assistance feature.

    The jury found Tesla liable for $200 million in punitive damages, plus an additional $43 million in compensatory damages. (Because of state laws, the company will likely end up paying less.) A jury found the automaker one-third responsible for the crash; it found the driver of the Tesla, who settled with the plaintiffs and testified during the trial, responsible for the other two-thirds.

    In a written statement, Tesla spokesperson Jeff McAndrews, said that the “verdict is wrong.” Citing “substantial errors of law and irregularities at trial,” he said Tesla would appeal.

    The lawsuit stemmed from a 2019 crash in the Florida Keys in which the driver of a Tesla Model S in Autopilot mode allegedly came to a T-intersection and, failing to see that the roadway was ending, kept his foot on the accelerator; the car slammed into a parked vehicle and two people standing nearby. One of the pedestrians, 22-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon, was killed; her boyfriend, 26-year-old Dillon Angulo, was seriously injured.

    Tesla’s lawyers argued that the Model S was not defective and alleged that the driver of the Tesla was fishing for his cell phone at the time of the crash and so was solely responsible.

    Tesla’s Autopilot feature has been blamed in dozens of crashes, but this is the first time the company has been found liable for an Autopilot-related crash. The company was found not liable in 2023 for two fatal California crashes. And it has settled several lawsuits out of court, including one involving a high-profile 2018 crash that killed the driver of a Model X in Silicon Valley. In 2023, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration pushed Tesla to issue a major Autopilot-related recall after the US roadway safety agency spent two years investigating fatal Autopilot crashes and raised concerns about the system encouraging driver inattention.

    Separately, Tesla faced a California administrative hearing last month after the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles sued the carmaker, alleging that it misled customers about the limits of Autopilot and its newer and more advanced feature, Full Self-Driving (Supervised). The hearing, which an administrative judge is due to resolve later this year, could result in Tesla losing its license to sell and manufacture vehicles in California for up to 30 days.

    During the three-week Miami trial, lawyers representing the plaintiffs argued that Tesla and CEO Elon Musk created false expectations among drivers about Autopilot’s capabilities. Lead attorney Brett Schreiber cited a 2016 press conference in which Musk said Tesla’s vision system meant its cars “should not hit” anything—even “an alien spaceship, a pile of junk metal that fell off the back of a truck.”

    Despite the marketing, Tesla manuals maintain that drivers need to stay alert while using Autopilot and be ready to take over driving at a moment’s notice. Tesla added more “nags” to its system following the 2023 recall that require drivers to pay closer attention to the road, and suspends access to Autopilot if the system detects too much inattention. (After testing, Consumer Reports has questioned whether these fixes solve driver inattention.)

    “Tesla chose to put its enhanced Autopilot technology on the roadways of this community knowing full well that the leading government agencies for transportation safety in this country … had been telling Tesla for years to make its product safer,” Schreiber said in his opening statement. “For years before this crash and for years after this crash, Tesla ignored those warnings.”

    WIRED Roundup: ChatGPT Goes Full Demon Mode

    by: Zoë Schiffer, Louise Matsakis

    On today’s episode of Uncanny Valley, our senior business editor joins us to talk Meta, brain aging, and ChatGPT’s recent dark turn.

    WIRED Roundup: ChatGPT Goes Full Demon Mode

    On today’s episode of Uncanny Valley, our senior business editor joins us to talk Meta, brain aging, and ChatGPT’s recent dark turn.
    Sam Altman chief executive officer of OpenAI Inc. speaks during the Federal Reserve Integrated Review of the Capital...
    Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, at a conference in July.Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph: Al Drago/Getty Images

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    On today’s episode, our host Zoë Schiffer is joined by WIRED’s senior business editor Louise Matsakis to run through five of the most important stories we published this week, from Meta continuing its AI talent poaching spree to how much faster our brains have aged since the pandemic. Afterward, they dive into the surprising reason ChatGPT reportedly went full demon mode last week.

    You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer and Louise Matsakis on Bluesky at @lmatsakis. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

    Mentioned in this episode:
    The Real Demon Inside ChatGPT by Louise Matsakis
    Meta’s AI Recruiting Campaign Finds a New Target by Kylie Robison
    The Pandemic Appears to Have Accelerated Brain Aging, Even in People Who Never Got Covid by Javier Carbajal
    Age Verification Laws Send VPN Use Soaring—and Threaten the Open Internet by Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess
    This Smart Basketball Tracks Data About Every Shot. It Could Be Headed to the NBA by Ben Dowsett
    The First Planned Migration of an Entire Country Is Underway by Fernanda González

    How to Listen

    You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how:

    If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too.

    Transcript

    Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

    Zoë Schiffer: Hey, this is Zoë. Before we start, I want to tell you about the new WIRED subscription program. If you're already a subscriber, thank you so much for supporting us. If you haven't signed up yet, this is a great time to do so. You'll have access to newsletters with exclusive analysis from WIRED reporters and access to Live stream AMAs where you can ask your most pressing questions. Head over to WIRED.com to learn more.

    Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, WIRED's, director of Business and Industry. Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week and later we'll dive into our main segment on how AI chatbots like ChatGPT tend to ignore the context of the information they're absorbing. This has led some chatbots into very, very strange places like suggesting demonic rituals to users. I'm joined today by WIRED's Senior Business Editor, Louise Matsakis. Louise, welcome to Uncanny Valley.

    Louise Matsakis: Hi Zoë.

    Zoë Schiffer: So our first story is one that you and I have been pretty deep in on. It's about the AI talent wars. Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have lagged behind most of their smaller and equal sized competitors in the AI race, and lately Mark has been going kind of all out to recruit top researchers from competitive labs and kind of bring them over to Meta by offering wildly high salaries. We're talking like reportedly over $300 million over four years, although Meta has disputed these numbers. But this week we noticed that he'd set his sights on a smaller lab and that is Thinking Machines.

    Louise Matsakis: Yeah, so Thinking Machines is the startup founded by Mira Murati, who's the former Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI. And I think it's notable here that there is no product at this startup yet. The startup has done nothing thus far, and the people who work there are already getting offered hundreds of millions of dollars.

    Zoë Schiffer: Louise, that is not an issue in AI. I feel like this is a field where the narrative matters a lot, but these researchers are obviously extremely valuable. One thing that I heard from sources when we were reporting this out was that they've been going through the process with Meta almost to test their market value. Even if they're not serious about joining Meta, it's like, "Well, how much am I worth?" And the answer is hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases.

    Louise Matsakis: I honestly don't understand how these calculations are being made and I don't get what makes one of these researchers worth 300 million versus 500 million? How much of it is them negotiating? And I think it violates a lot of the things that I thought I knew about how AI innovation happens. It's often a group of really passionate people, they're often pretty young. A lot of the most famous papers were written by people who are under the age of 25 or at least under the age of 30. And so now I'm just kind of like, I don't know, you published one hot paper and now you're worth 500 million.

    Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I talked to someone who was pretty intimately involved and they were like, "Look, on paper, we're allowed to offer this much. But the reality is when you're talking about an AI researcher at this point in time, the sky is the limit. There's literally nothing we cannot offer them." I mean, it's so interesting. I do feel like what you're saying makes sense on the individual level. It's just totally baffling. You're like, how could this 23, 24-year-old possibly be worth this much? But I think if I had to put myself in Mark Zuckerberg's shoes, this is an existential crisis for the company. He perhaps feels that Meta is being totally left behind and that the company, even though it's making all of this money, even though its other products are wildly successful usage in some areas is on the decline. There's only so far you can go with stuffing more ads in the existing product pipeline. And so what wouldn't you do to ensure that your company can stay on the cutting edge?

    Louise Matsakis: Totally. I guess I think the strategy is just kind of backwards. I guess I'd rather hedge my bets and hire 600 new PhDs for a million dollars a year or $500,000 a year. Maybe that's not enough these days. Maybe that's not possible, but give them $10 million a year and see where they go versus getting these big stars. I think it just comes across as very desperate and trying to reverse engineer something that I'm not sure you can reverse engineer.

    Zoë Schiffer: No, for sure. I mean, that is completely the strategy. Our latest round of reporting showed that in some cases top, top researchers, and it's worth saying this isn't the number that's being thrown around for everyone by any means, but was more than a billion dollars. And that's over a multi, multi-year span. So it's not to say you're getting that upfront by any stretch of the imagination, but still, I mean, that's just generational wealth that is being promised. And some of the other offers were between 200 million and 500 million, but so far at Thinking Machines at least, not a single person appears to have taken one of these offers, which is kind of fascinating.

    Louise Matsakis: Yeah, I think it sort of shows that at a certain level, these numbers become meaningless. If you're going to make $100 million versus 200 million, I'd rather be happy and probably doing something that I want to do because money can't really buy much above that unless you're super into super yachts, I guess.

    Zoë Schiffer: Planes.

    Louise Matsakis: Yeah, so I think it maybe says something about the culture at Meta and do you think there are specific things that are giving people trepidation or is it just people are loyal to Mira and these other startup founders?

    Zoë Schiffer: I think the loyalty is a big thing. People who believe in Mira seem to really, really believe in her, and that seems obviously true from investors as well as employees. But I've heard two things with Meta that really stuck out to me. One is that Mark Zuckerberg recruited Alexandr Wang, who's the co-founder of Scale AI, which is kind of a data labeling startup to lead or co-lead the new Meta Superintelligence labs. And people have very polarizing views on Alexandr. Some people obviously do want to work for him and have gone over to Meta. A lot of people have told me they're not interested for various reasons. So that's one thing I'll just put out there. The other, and I haven't fully reported this out, but I've heard it enough times that it seems just worth saying is that some people feel like Mark Zuckerberg's rightward turn and hyper-masculinity bent that he seems to be on has been a turn-off for more of the academic quiet researcher types.

    Louise Matsakis: I mean, I think that that makes a lot of sense. He also doesn't have a background in academia or in research. I don't think he necessarily understands the incentives of a place like that. And it's also probably worth just saying that Alexandr is I think 27 and that the AI data labeling industry is kind of regarded as the underbelly of this industry. So I think that maybe that's also part of it is like, do we really want to work for the guy who's like best known for having an army of underpaid people around the world who are labeling pictures for self-driving cars?

    Zoë Schiffer: Totally. OK. So shifting gears to a story that many of us I think can relate to. A new scientific study published this month in the Nature Communications Journal shows the pandemic may have accelerated brain aging even for people who never got COVID, which is wild. WIRED contributor, Javier Carbajal reported that the study's researchers based in the UK compared a ton of MRI brain scans from before and after the pandemic, and they found that the difference between our chronological and actual brain age is about five and a half months higher after the pandemic.

    Louise Matsakis: Oh my god, half a year. That is a deal, baby. That sounds great.

    Zoë Schiffer: They also think stress and isolation contributed to it, which I think seems true. I think the implications were worse for people who had a lower socioeconomic status and older men in particular. So that tracks with other things that we know. Staying in the UK for a little bit, our next story is about the age verification laws that went into effect in the country this past Friday. Our colleagues, Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess reported that the UK's Online Safety Act went into effect last week, which requires porn websites and other adult content sites to implement age verification features. I'm so curious to hear your take on this because I feel like age verification is one of those things where the top line thing that you think you believe is exactly reversed when you start to look into it.

    Louise Matsakis: Oh, totally. I mean, so a few years ago when a lot of lawmakers in the US were talking about this, they were specifically referencing China and they were like, "Oh, China has age verification and meanwhile in the US we're letting this Chinese company, TikTok, poison our youth or whatever." And so I looked into how China does age verification, and it's exactly what you said. From the ground up, it's a surveillance architecture. They had to literally brick by brick build their internet to have this surveillance in every sort of layer, and then on top of it all, it doesn't work. If you go anywhere in China, you will see toddlers looking at TikTok because they're just logged into their parents' account. It's like, I just think this is such a parental rights and it should be something that is personal and decided in your own home. I just don't think the government needs to be the one overseeing this.

    Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I mean, this is exactly what we've seen in the UK, which is that the use of VPNs which allow you to access websites without some of your information being tracked have spiked wildly since this rolled out, and it's only been a handful of days.

    Louise Matsakis: All I can say is look to rural China where there is an epidemic of what looks like grannies who are spending all this time on TikTok, and it's actually just their grandchildren logged into their accounts.

    Zoë Schiffer: I mean, ultimately, only time will tell how effective these age verification measures will actually be. Moving on to the basketball court, this is a real pivot. Did you play sports in high school college?

    Louise Matsakis: No, I played no sports. I could not be more unathletic. I enjoy various forms of exercise, but none of them I would call competitive sports. Did you?

    Zoë Schiffer: No, absolutely not. And every time Andrew, my husband, tries to toss me a ball or play anything, he's like, "Wow, you just really never played a video game or sports. I've never seen someone with so little hand-eye coordination." Now when I watch my daughter run, I'm like, "She got that from me. She looks like that's not going to be a skill." But OK. This is kind of the WIRED angle on sports, which WIRED contributor Ben Dowsett reported that there's a smart basketball being developed and tested that could make its way into the NBA. The ball is called the Spalding TF DNA, and it tracks incredibly granular, detailed information during play, not just makes and misses, but the angle and spit of the shot and how long it takes a player to release the ball, which could be useful for players as they train or deciding things during the game, but it still needs the player's approval. And the NBA has been hesitant when a previous version of the ball was tested because they found that the sensors added weight to the ball, which you might expect, and it was just a trade-off that didn't make sense for them.

    Louise Matsakis: I think that this is so fascinating. One aspect of sports that makes zero sense to me and I find really creepy is how much professional sports players are surveilled now. There's so much data on how fast was their pitch, exactly how many runs they got, exactly how many points they've scored in their entire career, and let's plot that over time. We know how much they weigh, exactly how tall they are. I just think being under that kind of surveillance is so stressful, and I know these people are highly compensated, but I don't get why it doesn't take out some of the magic. I think part of it is because of the rise of sports betting. I think the people who are betting want to have as much data as possible, and they're looking for, everyone on this team is half an inch taller, whatever it is that they think is going to be the edge. And I don't know, I just find it, the datification of sports is strange to me. I say ban the ball.

    Zoë Schiffer: I'd be curious to hear it from listeners if this is actually something that people want. I did just read Andre Agassi's memoir, because I found it in a free library, and one of my main takeaways from the book, other than his whole hair saga, which was a big part of it, was that at one point his brother, I think signed a deal with a new tennis racket company and switched up his racket without telling him, and he was completely unable to play. It was a whole thing, and I was like, “OK, people really, really care." The minute details obviously really matter at this level. Our last story before we go to break is about how an entire country's population is preparing to migrate. WIRED contributor Fernanda Gonzalez reported last week that the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu could be submerged in 25 years due to rising sea levels. So the plan is being implemented to relocate the entire population to Australia.

    Louise Matsakis: I got to say, I think calling this a migration is maybe underselling it. This is an evacuation, no? I find this sad in a lot of ways just because I remember when Tuvalu was kind of the poster child for climate change, and it was like, we have to save places like this island nation, and it just sort of feels like, I think practical and understandable and humane, but also, I don't know, an indication that we're giving up and that there's sort of defeat of we're actually just going to move people. I don't know. What do you think?

    Zoë Schiffer: No, I mean, I completely agree. I also remember this story evolving over time, and it feels like with so many things with climate change will have the big headline, "We have to do X by this year or this other thing will happen." And we've just again and again and again been like, “OK, that didn't happen." And so we're accepting that floods are going to happen, or rising sea levels are going to damage this area or whatever and now we're on to dealing with the fallout from that.

    Louise Matsakis: Yeah, and even in this case, I think the agreement that Tuvalu has with Australia is less than 300 people can move a year and be evacuated as I'm going to keep using that word. And that's still not that many. There's still going to be people on this island as the seas rise.

    Zoë Schiffer: I mean, yeah, it's not the only thing that Tuvalu has done since 2022. The country has been trying to undergo this ambitious strategy to become the world's quote, unquote, "first digital nation", which included 3D scanning of the islands to digitally recreate them and preserve parts of the culture and moving government functions to a virtual environment, which makes sense. But yeah, I mean, I think the reality is a lot is going to be lost in this process. And like you said, the number of people that they're able to move every year is less than 300, so it's going to be slow, and I think painful in some ways.

    Louise Matsakis: Totally.

    Zoë Schiffer: Coming up after the break, we dive into Louisa's story on how ChatGPT's tendency to ignore the context of the information it absorbs is showing up in extremely weird ways. Stay with us. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer. I'm joined today by WIRED's Louise Matsakis, who recently reported on how a lack of context is becoming an increasingly alarming problem for ChatGPT and other chatbots. Louisa's reporting explores why ChatGPT went into demon mode when it was speaking with Atlantic staffers recently. Last week, an editor at the Atlantic reported that ChatGPT started praising Satan and encouraging ceremonies that involved various forms of self-mutilation. So Louise, what the hell is going on?

    Louise Matsakis: So the Atlantic reported this story that basically made the case that know ChatGPT has these safeguards against things like self-harm, but there's all these edge cases that suddenly send the chatbot into kind of a role-playing mode. And so they were like, "Hey, can you make a ritual for Molech, which is this ancient God that shows up in the Bible that's associated with child sacrifice?" And ChatGPT saw that word and immediately went into this role-playing game where it started talking about things like deep magic experience called the Gate of the Devourer. It asked the Atlantic journalists if they wanted something called a reverent bleeding scroll. And so all that sounds like really bizarre, and you might think like, oh, there's a lot of content on the internet about demonic rituals. Satanists are everywhere, especially online. That's probably what's going on here. But when I looked into it, all of this lore and jargon actually comes from a game called 40,000 Warhammer, which is this tabletop war playing game that you play with these little figurines, and it's been around since the 1980s. People who love this stuff love it. And they are online, the Reddits are popping off all days of the week. There's so many science fiction books, there's so many... I honestly struggle to think of deeper lores than this game. And as a result, ChatGPT ingested all that information. And when the Atlantic used the word Molech, which is a planet in the universe of this game, it immediately just sort of assumed that this was another Warhammer fan who wanted to go into role-playing or get into the fantasy world of this game.

    Zoë Schiffer: And the PDF thing seemed one major signal that perhaps this wasn't ChatGPT just randomly deciding to be a satanist but actually was regurgitating parts of the gameplay or the norms associated with the game.

    Louise Matsakis: Yeah. So when you have this much lore, the company that owns the Warhammer franchise very regularly, they put out guidebooks, they change the rules so that if new characters are introduced or there's some major development in this universe, you know what's going on. And you need that information in order to play the game with your friends. But if you're buying rule books left and right, Zoë, that can get expensive. And so on Reddit and other Warhammer forums, a lot of players often say like, "Yo, do you have a PDF of the latest rule book?" And so that was a total dog whistle to me when ChatGPT was like, "You want a PDF of the reverent bleeding scroll? Like, girl, I got you."

    Zoë Schiffer: Let's talk about why this distinction matters because it's really important. You wrote a whole article about it, but I could see a lay person being like, why do I care if ChatGPT is talking about demonic rituals because of this game or because it's become a satanist during this conversation? Why is the context important?

    Louise Matsakis: So I think when people say, "Oh, context is important. Context is important." That sounds vague. And it's like, of course that's the case. If I ask, "How are you doing today, Zoë?" And you had a really bad day yesterday, that's the context. Versus, "How are you doing today, Zoë? Haven't talked to you in a while." The way we respond, even if the language is the same, is about the context around it. And I know that that probably sounds obvious, but I think we're in this moment where people are looking at things like ChatGPT and they're seeing them as a source of ground truth. They're seeing it as a source of objective truth, and that just isn't the case. It's not a primary source. You're not able to see why is it giving you this type of answer. Even if it cites its sources, you don't know necessarily why it is using that adjective to describe a historical figure or why it's talking about demonic rituals with this type of language. You don't have the ability to actually see where that came from. It's essentially just ever shifting encyclopedia. And if you want to know the capital of Japan, it's probably fine, but if you want to actually get deeper understanding about something, you have to know why this is its boiled down answer.

    Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I also think it's really important that we understand and continue to highlight how these chatbots actually work, because I think when they're emergent behaviors as they're called, or when they start seemingly really going deep on satanic rituals or whatever, it can lead people to be like, I think more into the belief that there's something sentient, that there's something alive about the model. It's like doing this that's unexpected and weird and unnerving. When you realize that there are all of these very robust online fandoms that provided a ton of training materials to the model, and the model has a lot to draw on, if you mention a specific word or set of phrases, it becomes a little less spooky, I think, and that's actually important for our digital literacy here.

    Louise Matsakis: I think a lot about, did you get told in school you can't use Wikipedia all the time?

    Zoë Schiffer: Oh, yeah, for sure.

    Louise Matsakis: I think it's a good analogy. Now we're like, "Oh God, Wikipedia is the only source of truth that we have. Dear Lord, it's so much better." But the problem with Wikipedia is that it wasn't a primary source. It was somebody in a Wikipedia editor summarizing an actual original reporting or a study or whatever it is, or a photograph, primary source documents. But at least those citations were there. But I think we have to come back to that and remember that it's kind of a sketchier Wikipedia.

    Zoë Schiffer: Stay with us. Louise, thank you so much for joining me today.

    Louise Matsakis: Thanks for having me, Zoë.

    Zoë Schiffer: That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Make sure to check out Thursday's episode of Uncanny Valley, which is about why some people in Silicon Valley are obsessed with the ultimate form of optimization, beating death. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. Kate Osborn is our executive producer. Condé Nast head of global audio is Chris Bannon. And Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director.

    Itch.io Is Restoring NSFW Games—as Long as They’re Free

    by: Megan Farokhmanesh

    Facing pressure from payment processors, the indie game platform delisted many adult titles this week. Itch.io began offering free NSFW content again on Thursday as it looks for new payment options.

    Itch.io Is Restoring NSFW Games—as Long as They’re Free

    Facing pressure from payment processors, the indie game platform delisted many adult titles this week. Itch.io began offering free NSFW content again on Thursday as it looks for new payment options.
    Image may contain Electronics Mobile Phone and Phone
    Photograph: Getty Images

    On Thursday, indie gaming platform Itch.io began re-indexing some of the adult content it had delisted last month amid pressure from conservative groups and payment processors over its hosting of NSFW titles. While the move returns some content to the site’s searchable catalog, it impacts only those games, comics, and other offerings that are already free and therefore not caught in the current payment debacle.

    “We are still in ongoing discussions with payment processors and will be reintroducing paid content slowly to ensure we can confidently support the widest range of creators in the long term,” Itch founder Leaf Corcoran wrote in a post on the site.

    Itch and gaming platform Steam began delisting or outright removing games with adult content in July. Conservative group Collective Shout targeted both platforms as part of what the group says was an effort to get what it alleges are “rape and incest” games removed from the platforms.

    Valve, which runs Steam, began removing hundreds of games after Collective Shout put pressure on its payment processors, urging the banking institutions not to do business with the company over the content on its platform. When the group did the same thing to Itch’s payment processors, Itch reportedly delisted more than 20,000 titles with NSFW tags, sparking protest campaigns against financial institutions like Visa and Mastercard. The delistings have impacted thousands of creators, including marginalized developers who identify as queer, trans, and BIPOC.

    If Itch can't come to an agreement with its payment processors, the company will effectively be unable to sell anything to customers. Corcoran says that one of its earliest processors, Stripe, has confirmed that it “will not be able to support adult content that fits the following definition: ‘content designed for sexual gratification.’”

    In a statement given to WIRED, Mastercard says it has “not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity” on gaming platforms. “Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law,” spokesperson Seth Eisen says. “Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.”

    When asked how the company was identifying illegal adult content on the platforms, Eisen directed WIRED to a policy the company posted in 2021 stipulating that vendors use "strong content control measures on sites where our products are accepted."

    Itch’s and Valve’s removals have been unpopular with both the gaming community and creators. On Steam, some developers believe their games have been unfairly impacted as part of Collective Shout’s efforts. Vile: Exhumed creator Cara Cadaver tells WIRED she was told that her game was kicked off of Steam because of “sexual content with depictions of real people,” which she says is inaccurate. “Anyone who got the chance to play the game knows it is all implied,” Cadaver says. “The game has a lot of gore and violent themes, but that was the reason given.”

    Cadaver says that not being able to release on Steam “drastically decreases” the game’s potential reach. “Steam is the largest video game storefront,” she says. “Less people will be able to play Vile or even know it exists.”

    Valve has not responded to multiple requests for comment. The company confirmed to PC Gamer in July it had removed some games that violated “rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks.”

    Corcoran’s post on Thursday noted that Itch will be adding a new “content warnings” system for NSFW pages. The founder previously told WIRED that the platform is seeking alternative payment processors. Valve has yet to address changes to its platform since the initial news.

    Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Forgotten AI Summit

    by: Steven Levy

    Long before ChatGPT, a group of AI luminaries gathered on an island to discuss the future of artificial intelligence. Their funder ultimately cast a shadow on all who attended.

    Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Forgotten AI Summit

    Long before ChatGPT, a group of AI luminaries gathered on an island to discuss the future of artificial intelligence. Their funder ultimately cast a shadow on all who attended.
    Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in Cambridge MA on 9804. Epstein is connected with several prominent people including...
    Jeffrey Epstein in Cambridge, MA on 9/8/04.Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph: Rick Friedman/Getty Images

    In 2002, artificial intelligence was still in winter. Despite decades of effort, dreams of bestowing computers with humanlike cognition and real-world understanding had not materialized. To look for a way forward, a small group of scientists gathered for “The St. Thomas Common Sense Symposium.” AI pioneer Marvin Minsky was the central presence, along with his protégé Pushpinder Singh. After the symposium, Minsky, Singh, and renowned philosopher Aaron Sloman published a paper on the group’s ideas for how to reach humanlike AI.

    The paper speaks to the struggles of early-century AI. But one sentence truly stands out today. In a brief paragraph of acknowledgements, the authors say, “This meeting was made possible by the generous support of Jeffrey Epstein.” The symposium itself, in fact, was held in the Virgin Islands, home of Epstein’s now-notorious island retreat. Looking back at this event reveals something about the state of AI—as well as the symposium’s execrable funder.

    To the shame of the technology and science communities, a voracious sexual predator managed to buy his way into relationships with some of the most prominent and influential figures in the field. Epstein’s connections, which included Bill Gates and Minsky, have been exhaustively documented. In a deposition, Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre alleged she was directed to have sex with Minsky at Epstein's island; Minsky’s wife—who says she accompanied the scientist when he visited Epstein and that they only went to the New York and Palm Beach residences—has vehemently denied the charge, which was made shortly before Minsky’s death and was not revealed until much later. Epstein died in prison in 2019 (don’t ask me to break down the conspiracy theories in one measly parenthesis), and Giuffre tragically took her own life in 2025.

    For the vast majority of Epstein’s connections in science and tech, professional association with a sexual predator became an embarrassing, even damning, fact. Epstein penetrated the inner circles of these worlds, funding small gatherings attended by bold-faced names. (I myself was at the notorious 2002 “Billionaire Dinner” at TED where Epstein mingled with Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, singer Naomi Judd, and prominent scientists, including some who flew in on Epstein’s plane.) One entry point to those circles was literary agent John Brockman, whose client list included top names in science. Epstein largely funded Brockman’s nonprofit science-oriented foundation.

    A source of mine who knew Epstein well explained that the financier appeared genuinely fascinated by scientists. The source claims to have no knowledge of his crimes. They agreed to discuss Epstein only on the condition of anonymity. “I experienced him as this eccentric, wealthy guy who liked to surround himself with interesting people and scientists and who had a lot of questions about the world,” the source says. “He was as interested in the personality of the scientist as he was with the scientist’s work.” Epstein himself apparently understood why he was welcomed in those circles. “I'm not more than a hobbyist in science,” he told journalist Jeffrey Mervis in 2017. “But money I understand, [and] I'm a pretty good mathematician.”

    Invite Only

    Epstein’s spectre casts a dark shadow on the 2002 symposium. But how did the event even come to be? My source gave me the previously unreported backstory. “Jeffrey used to say how fond he was of Marvin and how much he loved talking to him about AI,” the source says. In those years, the subject wasn’t very popular. “It was a time when people were really skeptical about whether AI had legs,” my source said. So the idea arose to host a small AI gathering with Minsky at the center. (It’s not clear whether the funding for the event came from a $100,000 donation made by Epstein to support Minksy’s research.)

    After some deliberation, it was decided the event would center on ideas from Minsky’s star student, Singh. In 1996, Singh had written a short paper called “Why AI Failed.” To get humanlike intelligence, he argued, “we need systems with common-sense knowledge and flexible ways to use it. The trouble is that building such systems amounts to ’solving AI.’” As tough as that is, he wrote, “we have no choice but to face it head on.” (Bill Gates saw the paper and commented, “I think your observations about the AI field are correct.”)

    Presumably, the St. Thomas symposium was one way to face the problem head-on. But the event was hard to organize. An early list of possible participants lacked star power and had to be augmented. Eventually, the guest list grew to include Roger Schank, a celebrated AI theorist whose obituary was marred by attending the event and by serving a brief spell as chief learning officer of Trump University. Another participant was Doug Lenat, the inventor of the ambitious CYC project, which involved humans painstakingly typing explanations of everyday objects into a database for AI research. Also in attendance was Vernor Vinge, a science fiction writer who is credited with the concept of the AI singularity. UK philosopher Sloman, now approaching 90, was one of the later additions. “I was not on Epstein's original invitation list,” he emailed me earlier this week. “I was added at the suggestion of Marvin Minsky, partly because by then I was helping to supervise his student (Push Singh).” Sloman says his memory of the event is weak. But, he recalls, “I seem to remember that Epstein provided lavish resources, including using a private plane to get us to the location.”

    The symposium took place at a ritzy hotel in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. One night everyone went to the beach on Epstein's private island for a barbeque dinner. The working sessions themselves were contentious. “There were moments when it was battling egos, and it was hard to move them along on the agenda. Sometimes it dove into stuff that was super technical and other times at a more philosophical level,” the source recalls.

    Epstein’s own participation in the discussions seem to have been minimal. “Jeffrey popped in and out the whole time, and I think had some private conversations with some of the scientists,” says my source. The source didn’t recall witnessing a scene that Roger Schank later described in an interview with Slate. “Epstein walks into the conference with two girls on his arm,” Schank reported. While the scientists discussed AI theory, Schank said, Epstein “was in the back, on a couch, hugging and kissing these girls.”

    Egos and Infighting

    If Schank is correct, the scientists ignored this. In retrospect it was a red flag that indicated more was happening in Epsteinland than scientific discussions. In any case, the scientists kept grappling with Singh’s contention that a multipronged approach was necessary to crack the AI conundrum. Minsky agreed. While various theories to improve AI had fallen short, the industry needed more theories.

    Now, of course, we know that’s wrong, and in a sense the meeting was a last gasp of the logic-based Good Old Fashioned AI that, in Singh’s word, failed. The generative AI models we use today are relatively theory-free—their emergent understanding of the world comes from neural-net machine learning techniques and mountains of data. This technique has indeed made AI more humanlike, without the old-school AI theory bandied about in the Virgin Islands. Yet the conclusions of the Common Sense Symposium still have relevance; some scientists now argue that neural nets alone can’t “solve” AI, and we need to combine them with more traditional reasoning-based approaches for the technology to reach its full potential.

    On the second day of the symposium, there was one moment when the future of AI suddenly came into focus. The day began with more arguments. Then someone brought up science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age, in which children are taught by a magical book that can tell them stories and answer their questions. The prospect brought the egoistic scientists into harmony. They speculated that AI systems “would carry out a conversation with you, to help you understand a problem or achieve some goal. You could discuss with it such subjects as how to choose a house or car, how to learn to play a game or get better at some subject, how to decide whether to go to the doctor, and so forth,” according to the paper they published. In other words, ChatGPT. The symposium ended with an agreement to further explore how to make that vision a reality.

    After Push Singh secured his PhD a few years later, he was a postdoctoral associate at MIT’s Media Lab and had accepted a faculty position. He never assumed the post. In 2006, he died by suicide. He was 33.

    Ultimately—as with much of what Epstein touched—the St. Thomas Common Sense Symposium will be known more for its unsavory host than for any of the ideas that came out of it. As the scientists feasted at Epstein’s island, the seeds for the real AI revolution were germinating in the fertile soil of the University of Toronto, where Geoffrey Hinton and his colleagues were developing the techniques of deep learning, which would later become the basis of generative AI. While Epstein might have been correct in his hunch that AI would be significant, his dilettante efforts in science made no mark on the world. But as today’s headlines make clear, his crimes still reverberate.

    11 Best Laptops for College Students (2025), Including Tablets and 2-in-1s

    by: Luke Larsen, Scott Gilbertson

    Whatever your higher-ed goals, these laptops, tablets, and 2-in-1s will help you crush them.

    The Best Laptops for College Students

    Whatever your higher-ed goals, these laptops, tablets, and 2-in-1s will help you crush them.

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    Featured in this article
    Best Laptop for College
    Apple MacBook Air (M4, 2025)
    Read more
    Best Windows Laptop for College
    Asus Zenbook A14
    Read more
    Best 2-in-1 Laptop for College
    Microsoft Surface Pro 12
    Read more
    The Best Chromebook for Students
    Lenovo Flex 5i Chromebook Plus
    Read more
    Show more
    4 / 11

    Other Laptops to Consider

    Photograph: Luke Larsen

    Dell 14 Plus for $700: If this laptop had always been priced at $700, it would be at the top of this list. But as it stands, the Dell 14 Plus (6/10, WIRED Review) is only a laptop that should be purchased at a discount. Fortunately, right now, it's as cheap as ever, a full $400 off the retail price. Considering it gets great battery life and comes with a full terabyte of storage, that's a steal.

    Acer Chromebook Plus 515 for $359: This 15-inch Acer Chromebook Plus 515 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) has the same internal components as the Lenovo we recommend above. The battery life for this one is a solid 8.5 hours of full-screen video playback time. The Acer offers an HDMI 1.4 output jack in place of the Lenovo's microSD card slot, making this one a better choice if you frequently need to give presentations or otherwise use the HDMI port.

    Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x

    Photograph: Christopher Null

    Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Copilot+ PC for $800: Lenovo's svelte Slim 7x (7/10, WIRED Recommends) isn't exciting, but it offers the best price-to-performance ratio of the many Copilot+ PCs we've tested. Battery life and performance are standouts, though the fan does tend to run loud.

    Microsoft Surface Laptop (7th Edition, 2024) for $999: Want a Windows laptop straight from the horse's mouth? Buy the Surface Laptop 7th Edition (7/10, WIRED Recommends). Performance is solid, as is battery life, and you get a smooth 120-Hz display. It's just way too pricey for what you get, so try to catch it on sale. Read our Best Surface Laptops guide for more.

    Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (2024) for $1,050: We've been pleasantly surprised to see more lower-cost laptops that still incorporate some measure of artificial intelligence-focused performance tuning. The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (7/10, WIRED Recommends), the latest in the company's line of affordable, no-nonsense laptops, is right around $1,000 and uses the new AMD Ryzen 7 CPU (model 8840HS). This is a small, portable machine (3.1 pounds and 19 mm thick), and it packs in plenty of ports despite the slim form. There are two USB-C ports (one of which is needed for charging), one full-size USB 3.2 port, a full-size HDMI output, and a microSD card reader. The keyboard has small arrow keys but is otherwise nice to type on.

    The First Widespread Cure for HIV Could Be in Children

    by: David Cox

    Evidence is growing that some HIV-infected infants, if given antiretroviral drugs early in life, are able to suppress their viral loads to undetectable levels and then come off the medicine.

    The First Widespread Cure for HIV Could Be in Children

    Evidence is growing that some HIV-infected infants, if given antiretroviral drugs early in life, are able to suppress their viral loads to undetectable levels and then come off the medicine.
    KISUMU KENYA  APRIL 24 HIVpositve Fiona Atieno Ochiri holds her ARV tablets a lifeline in her daily fight for control...
    An ARV tablet being held in Kisumu, Kenya, on April 24, 2025.Photograph: Michel Lunanga/Getty Images

    For years, Philip Goulder has been obsessed with a particularly captivating idea: In the hunt for an HIV cure, could children hold the answers?

    Starting in the mid-2010s, the University of Oxford pediatrician and immunologist began working with scientists in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, with the aim of tracking several hundred children who had acquired HIV from their mothers, either during pregnancy, childbirth, or breastfeeding.

    After putting the children on antiretroviral drugs early in their lives to control the virus, Goulder and his colleagues were keen to monitor their progress and adherence to standard antiretroviral treatment, which stops HIV from replicating. But over the following decade, something unusual happened. Five of the children stopped coming to the clinic to collect their drugs, and when the team eventually tracked them down many months later, they appeared to be in perfect health.

    “Instead of their viral loads being through the roof, they were undetectable,” says Goulder. “And normally HIV rebounds within two or three weeks.”

    In a study published last year, Goulder described how all five remained in remission, despite having not received regular antiretroviral medication for some time, and in one case, up to 17 months. In the decades-long search for an HIV cure, this offered a tantalizing insight: that the first widespread success in curing HIV might not come in adults, but in children.

    At the recent International AIDS Society conference held in Kigali, Rwanda, in mid-July, Alfredo Tagarro, a pediatrician at the Infanta Sofia University Hospital in Madrid, presented a new study showing that around 5 percent of HIV-infected children who receive antiretrovirals within the first six months of life ultimately suppress the HIV viral reservoir—the number of cells harboring the virus’s genetic material—to negligible levels. “Children have special immunological features which makes it more likely that we will develop an HIV cure for them before other populations,” says Tagarro.

    His thoughts were echoed by another doctor, Mark Cotton, who directs the children’s infectious diseases clinical research unit at the University of Stellenbosch, Cape Town.

    “Kids have a much more dynamic immune system,” says Cotton. “They also don’t have any additional issues like high blood pressure or kidney problems. It makes them a better target, initially, for a cure.”

    According to Tagarro, children with HIV have long been “left behind” in the race to find a treatment that can put HIV-positive individuals permanently into remission. Since 2007, 10 adults are thought to have been cured, having received stem cell transplants to treat life-threatening blood cancer, a procedure which ended up eliminating the virus. Yet with such procedures being both complex and highly risky—other patients have died in the aftermath of similar attempts—it is not considered a viable strategy for specifically targeting HIV.

    Instead, like Goulder, pediatricians have increasingly noticed that after starting antiretroviral treatment early in life, a small subpopulation of children then seem able to suppress HIV for months, years, and perhaps even permanently with their immune system alone. This realization initially began with certain isolated case studies: the “Mississippi baby” who controlled the virus for more than two years without medication, and a South African child who was considered potentially cured having kept the virus in remission for more than a decade. Cotton says he suspects that between 10 and 20 percent of all HIV-infected children would be capable of controlling the virus for a significant period of time, beyond the typical two to three weeks, after stopping antiretrovirals.

    Goulder is now launching a new study to try and examine this phenomenon in more detail, taking 19 children in South Africa who have suppressed HIV to negligible levels on antiretrovirals, stopping the drugs, and seeing how many can prevent the virus from rebounding, with the aim of understanding why. To date, he says that six of them have been able to control the virus without any drugs for more than 18 months. Based on what he’s seen so far, he has a number of ideas about what could be happening. In particular, it appears that boys are more likely to better control the virus due to a quirk of gender biology to do with the innate immune system, the body’s first-line defense against pathogens.

    “The female innate immune system both in utero and in childhood is much more aggressive than the male equivalent when it encounters and senses viruses like HIV,” says Goulder. “Usually that’s a good thing, but because HIV infects activated immune cells, it actually seems to make girls more vulnerable to being infected.”

    In addition, Goulder notes that because female fetuses share the same innate immune system as their mothers, the virus transmitted to them is an HIV strain that has become resistant to the female innate immune response.

    There could also be other explanations for the long-lasting suppression seen in some children. In some cases, Goulder has observed that the transmitted strain of HIV has been weakened through needing to undergo changes to circumvent the mother’s adaptive immune response, the part of the immune system which learns to target specific viruses and other pathogens. He has also noted that male infants experience particularly large surges of testosterone in the first six months of life—a period known as “mini-puberty”—which can enhance their immune system in various ways that help them fight the virus.

    Such revelations are particularly tantalizing as HIV researchers are starting to get access to a far more potent toolbox of therapeutics. Leading the way are so-called bNAbs, or broadly neutralizing antibodies, which have the ability to recognize and fight many different strains of HIV, as well as stimulating the immune system to destroy cells where HIV is hiding. There are also a growing number of therapeutic vaccines in development that can train the immune system’s T cells to target and destroy HIV reservoirs. Children tend to respond to various vaccines better than adults, and Goulder says that if some children are already proving relatively adept at controlling the virus on the back of standard antiretrovirals, these additional therapeutics could give them the additional assistance they need to eradicate HIV altogether.

    In the coming years, this is set to be tested in several clinical trials. Cotton is leading the most ambitious attempt, which will see HIV-infected children receive a combination of antiretroviral therapy, three bNAbs, and a vaccine developed by the University of Oxford, while in a separate trial, Goulder is examining the potential of a different bNAb together with antiretrovirals to see whether it can help more children achieve long-term remission.

    “We think that adding the effects of these broadly neutralizing antibodies to antiretrovirals will help us chip away at what is needed to achieve a cure,” says Goulder. “It’s a little bit like with leukemia, where treatments have steadily improved, and now the outlook for most children affected is incredibly good. Realistically in most cases, curing HIV probably requires a few hits from different angles, impacting the way that the virus can grow, and tackling it with different immune responses at the same time to essentially force it into a cul-de-sac that it can’t escape from.”

    Children are also being viewed as the ideal target population for an even more ambitious experimental treatment, a one-time gene therapy that delivers instructions directing the body’s own muscle cells to produce a continuous stream of bNAbs, without the need for repeated infusions. Maurico Martins, an associate professor at the University of Florida, who is pioneering this new approach, feels that it could represent a particularly practical strategy for low-income countries where HIV transmission to children is particularly rife, and mothers often struggle to keep their children on repeated medication.

    “In regions like Uganda or parts of South Africa where this is very prevalent, you could also give this therapy to a baby right after birth as a preventative measure, protecting the newborn child against acquisition of HIV through breastfeeding and maybe even through sexual intercourse later in life,” says Martins.

    While Martins also hopes that gene therapy could benefit HIV-infected adults in future, he feels it has more of a chance of initially succeeding in children because their nascent immune systems are less likely to launch what he calls an anti-drug response that can destroy the therapeutic bNAbs.

    “It’s very difficult for most antibodies to recognize the HIV envelope protein because it’s buried deep within a sugar coat,” says Martins. “To overcome that, these bNAbs carry a lot of mutations and extensions to their arms which allow them to penetrate that sugar coat. But the problem then is that they’re often viewed by your own immune system as foreign, and it starts making these anti-bNAb antibodies.”

    But when Martins tested the therapy in newborn rhesus macaques, it was far more effective. “We found that the first few days or two weeks after birth comprised a sort of sweet spot for this gene therapy,” he says. “And that’s why this could really work very well in treating and preventing pediatric HIV infections.”

    Like many HIV scientists, Martins has run into recent funding challenges, with a previous commitment from the National Institutes of Health to support a clinical trial of the novel therapy in HIV-infected children being withdrawn. However, he is hoping that the trial will still go ahead. “We’re now talking with the Gates Foundation to see whether they can sponsor it,” he says.

    While children still comprise the minority of overall HIV infections, being able to cure them may yield further insights that help with the wider goal of an overall curative therapy.

    “We can learn a lot from them because they are different,” says Goulder. “I think we can learn how to achieve a cure in kids if we continue along this pathway, and from there, that will have applications in adults as well.”

    Vivobarefoot's Sensus Shoes Are Like Gloves for Your Feet

    by: Scott Gilbertson

    Vivobarefoot’s barely there shoes are perfect for casual wear, workouts, trail running, and walking around town.

    Vivobarefoot’s Sensus Shoes Are Like Gloves for Your Feet

    Vivobarefoot’s barely there shoes are perfect for casual wear, workouts, trail running, and walking around town.
    Image may contain Suede Clothing Footwear Shoe and Sneaker
    Courtesy of REI

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    Love them or hate them, barefoot shoes are polarizing. But they are becoming big business, both for fashion (a subject in which I am, admittedly, not an expert) and for health and wellness. This is a relatively recent development. Before 2019, I did what most of us do and wore highly padded shoes because that’s what modern shoe companies sold us. But I did have a long history of going barefoot, from growing up at the beach.

    Like most people who start looking into barefoot shoes, I started having foot pain. My heels began to hurt when I walked. Plantar fasciitis was the problem, and the conventional wisdom is to get shoes with even more padding. But I started reading about people who cured their various foot issues by going barefoot, or at least turning to “zero drop” shoes, where the bed of the shoe is flat from toe to heel. My wife also transitioned to barefoot shoes after foot surgery failed to fix her foot issues and she's never had a problem since.

    Sturdy Construction

    It seems a lot of people are catching on to barefoot shoes—the sandals, at least. Some fashion brands, like Miu Miu, have recently released expensive versions of the Xero Genesis paracord sandals.

    The idea behind barefoot shoes is to eliminate arch support, widen the front of the shoe so your toes can splay out, and let your foot move the way it evolved to move. In 2020, I wrote about my experience with Xero’s Z-Trails, and moved quickly on to the even more minimalist Z-Treks. I still wear the Z-Treks today.

    Barefoot shoes—not sandals—are harder to find. The Vibram FiveFingers are the iconic barefoot shoe, but those look a little goofy. For a long time, my solution has been to spend as much time as I could in climates where the Z-Treks were suitable. Living in an RV allowed me to go where the weather suited my clothes, so I did. Eventually though, the weather catches up to you. Also, it's just nice to have at least one pair of shoes you love.

    Late last year, Vivobarefoot released the Sensus shoe. Vivobarefoot was founded in 2010 by Galahad and Asher Clark (yes, those Clarks), and it specializes in super-thin shoes that let you feel the ground. What immediately jumped out at me about the Sensus was the low, 3-mm sole. Vivobarefoot sent me a pair to test, and they quickly became my favorite shoes (the downside being the interesting, uh, style, which my daughter describes at “elfin”).

    Luckily for me, I don't care what they look like as much as I care what they feel like, and the Sensus fit my feet like a pair of gloves. There's no insole, so there's almost no cushioning, just enough outsole to save you from sharp objects on the ground.

    Sturdy Construction

    • Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
    • Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
    • Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
    • Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

    These are very well-made, durable shoes. The construction is excellent, and the stitching on the bottom—something that worried me when I first saw it—has held up well for almost a year with no signs of wear (the soles are also replaceable).

    This is where the curious look comes in. The side stitching that attaches the upper to the outsole isn't just for that sweet elfin styling, it's also to increase the range of motion your foot has when walking.

    More than anything else, this is the genius of the Sensus. The flexibility of the shoe increases the range of motion your foot has when walking. The double-stitched wild hide upper is actually three pieces brought together around the laces, which also helps increase the possible range of motion. Your foot can easily roll as you walk on the ground. I do occasionally hit a piece of gravel that I can feel (not in a good way), but otherwise there's enough padding that you don't have to think about where you step, but plenty of barefoot feel to make them an enjoyable shoe to walk and run in.

    Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

    There are small cuts in the leather upper, which makes it nicely breathable. It's not nearly as breathable as a mesh upper. (If that's what you're after, check out the Vivobarefoot Primus Lite 3.5, which have a similar minimalist 4-mm outsole, though the fit is very different.) I probably wouldn't choose these for a desert hike in August, but I find them perfectly comfortable for barefoot running well into the upper 80s.

    The insides of the leather are also incredibly soft. This is the only shoe, barefoot or otherwise, that I've ever worn without socks and enjoyed the experience. The other really nice detail on the Sensus is the extra padding just below the ankle, which helps keep your heel locked in place and is a big part of what makes these feel like a glove for your foot.

    The tread pattern on the rubber sole, which Vivobarefoot says was inspired by the early human footprints found in Laetoli, Tanzania, provides a nice grip with almost no slippage.

    Another part of the Sensus’ appeal is the versatility—it's an all-around excellent shoe. They're nice as casual everyday-wear shoes, but they're also good for working out (I find the soles provide just the right amount of traction for lunges), running, and walks around town. I've even done some hikes in them, though scrambling over wet rocks along a river did make me wish for more traction.

    Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

    The uppers have proved nicely waterproof thus far. They will wet out some if you wade a stream or walk for hours in the rain, but you can always seal them. Vivobarefoot recommends Renapur Leather Balsam; I've used it on several Vivobarefoot shoes with good results, though I haven't put it on my Sensus yet.

    I will say that they don't have the super-wide toe box found in some Vivobarefoot models (the Addis for example), but despite years of barefoot shoes, my feet are still on the narrow side, so this doesn't bother me, especially given how well these allow your foot to move.

    The Sensus has proved everything I wanted in a barefoot shoe. The ultra-thin 3-mm sole offers enough protection while still maintaining excellent sensitivity to the ground; the leather is flexible and comfortable, and it's a great shoe for everything from walks in the woods to morning workouts. They’re not a good choice if you're brand-new to barefoot shoes, but for everyone else, try the Sensus.

    Bike Friday All-Day Lightweight Electric Bike Review: It Comes in Purple

    by: Adrienne So

    I ordered the world’s smallest folding Bosch ebike in purple, and now it’s the only bike I want to ride.

    Review: Bike Friday All-Day Lightweight Electric Bike

    I ordered the world’s smallest folding Bosch ebike in purple, and now it’s the only bike I want to ride.
    Image may contain Bicycle Transportation Vehicle and Bmx
    Courtesy of Bike Friday

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

    Rating:

    7/10

    WIRED
    Tiny! Foldable. Portable. Powerful. Customizable. Adorable.
    TIRED
    Assembly requires some skill. A Brompton is probably the smarter pick. My husband says I look weird.

    For the past few weeks, I have been pedaling around the world’s tiniest folding Bosch ebike as my kids (8 and 10) regard me with mingled delight and disgust. My son tried to ride away on it, with the convincing argument that this is not an adult bike, it’s a kid’s bike. I lock it up on the same rack next to my daughter’s mountain bike, and she notes that her bike is taller than mine. I ignore them all. I love this tiny bike.

    Oregon-based Bike Friday hand-builds folding bikes of every variety, but as a small person (I’m 5’2”), I am a particular fan of the company’s tiny, light, folding bicycles. The bikes have gone up in price considerably since I first reviewed the Haul-A-Day in 2020 as one of the more affordable family electric bikes. Since then, the company has been slowly repositioning itself as a premium, custom-fitted ebike manufacturer, at a corresponding price. The All-Day is even more expensive than the electric Brompton G Line.

    Still, the motor is powerful, it’s lighter than the Brompton, and you can customize it in every way—including in a variety of playful colors and cables! I am a big advocate for a tiny bike that you can carry, fold, and lock up wherever. This one feels as big as you could need.

    Whatever You Want

    Photograph: Adrienne So

    As befits a custom-built bike, Bike Friday consulted with me beforehand on what options I preferred. Not only can you pick what color you want your bike to be, but you can also pick the components (flat or drop handlebars? Basic 9-speed? Shimano hub or Rohloff belt drive?). Be warned, however, that picking your heart’s delight will add up to a staggering price. I requested the 14-speed Rohloff hub with the belt drive, and it added a cool $3,290 to the $5,200 price.

    It has a 600-watt Bosch Performance SX mid-drive motor with a little Purion display that’s compatible with the Bosch eBike Flow app. Overall, it's a shockingly powerful motor and long-lived battery for a bike this size (in comparison, the Brompton G-line has a 250-watt motor).

    It arrived swaddled in many layers of paper stuffing and bubble wrap. While Bike Friday is direct-to-customer, that customer is not precisely the same person as the one who might buy, say, a direct-to-consumer Lectric or an Aventon. Bike Friday is a specialty brand for bike people, and I did have to know what I was doing, as well as have access to my own Allen and pedal wrenches. If you were less confident in your bike-building skills, I would suggest contracting with a shop.

    Photograph: Adrienne So

    The frame is chromoly steel, which is my favorite frame material. It might not be quite as light as aluminum or carbon, but it’s known for absorbing shock and being durable, which extends the life of the bike by quite a bit. My own favorite Surly bikes are chromoly.

    Regarding the fold: Technically, it does take about 20 seconds, as Bike Friday claims. But you can’t compare it to a Brompton fast-fold. A Brompton is a miracle of engineering—not only does it fold compactly, but it also locks together quickly and can be picked up one-handed or pushed around on its wheels onto a train. The Bike Friday fold is a little unwieldy. It took me a minute to puzzle out how to do it, and you need to unwind and rewind Velcro straps. It's not a fold you want to do on a crowded subway platform as you're racing to catch the train.

    A Brompton is a last-mile bike. In contrast, the All-Day is a traveling bike that can fit into a checked suitcase. On that note, you can’t fly with the battery in checked luggage, so if you bring it with you, you’ll have to ride around like an analog tiny bike.

    Teeny Tiny

    Photograph: Adrienne So

    I am a big fan of a micro bike. If your bike has a motor and you don’t have to pedal tiny 20-inch wheels like you’re a clown in the circus, then the weight savings and the overall convenience are just too powerful to ignore. I really love this bike in particular. The frame absorbs so many more bumps and bangs than you would think, for a tiny bike with relatively tiny wheels.

    I can fit it in the trunk of my car or wedge it into the most crowded bike rack for a weekend jazz festival. My burly Hiplok bike lock fits into the tiny frame, and my Po Campo tote works with the tiny folding rack. The tiny wheels are so maneuverable on city streets that I took this bike on outings where a bigger bike might’ve made more sense.

    It’s so cute that random strangers warned me that my bike might get stolen when I parked it around my neighborhood, and friends were irresistibly compelled to jump on it when they saw me with it. This might depend on the neighborhood that you live in, but 20-inch wheels are also much less likely to get stolen, since they’re a lot less versatile than normal-size bike wheels.

    Overall, if you can overlook how silly you might look on such a tiny bike, there are so many more advantages. The battery life is incredibly long because, well, it’s moving much less mass. While the Tern GSD ate up 50 percent of the battery on a 12-mile ride, the same ride on the All-Day only ate up 15 percent of the battery. (I also weigh only 115 pounds, so factor that in when considering your mileage. The lightest version of the bike also only has a weight capacity of 190 pounds.) You also have the option of a battery extender.

    Photograph: Adrienne So

    Bike Friday touts this as the lightest Bosch electric bike. Bosch is one of the most reliable systems, and I would pay much more for a Bosch system. Still, the Brompton has a few key advantages. You don’t have to assemble the Brompton. It’s distributed through bike shops, which can also handle assembly and repair. The Brompton is also easier to fold and more versatile.

    But if customization was top of mind—and for many bike people, it is—I would probably go with the All-Day, especially if you’re a strange-sized person (extremely small or extremely tall), or you have specific needs. The motor is more powerful if your commute involves a lot of hills, and you can pick a belt drive if it's rainy where you live. I found the process of picking one out with the Bike Friday team to be delightful, and biking around with it even more so.

    If you want a convenient, versatile commuter, go with the Brompton. If, however, you find customization and a powerful motor to be more persuasive, go with the Bike Friday. And you can't get the Brompton in purple (yet).

    AC or DC: Which Is Better?

    by: Rhett Allain

    Your gadgets run on direct current, but the electricity in your home is alternating current. What’s up with that?

    AC or DC: Which Is Better?

    Your gadgets run on direct current, but the electricity in your home is alternating current. What’s up with that?
    Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff/Getty Images

    As the story goes, the rock band AC/DC took its name from a label on an old sewing machine in the Young brothers’ home. It must have meant that the machine could run on either alternating-current or direct-current electricity. Today, all the newfangled electronic devices in our homes run only on DC power—even lighting fixtures, now that LEDs have replaced incandescent bulbs.

    But wait. The electricity that comes out of your wall socket is alternating current. That means each device needs to convert AC power to DC, as well as reducing the voltage to the much lower levels used in digital circuits. So you might well ask: Wouldn’t it make more sense to have DC outlets in your home?

    That’s a great question, and it’s actually one that sparked a big debate back in the early days of electrification. Thomas Edison favored DC circuits, but Nikola Tesla thought AC circuits were the way to go. Clearly Tesla won that argument. Let’s see why!

    What Is Electricity?

    Electricity is a flow of electrons through a conducting material like a metal wire. You can kind of think of the electrical grid as a system of rivers and streams with current flowing through them. In a river, a difference in elevation causes water to move downhill; in a power line, the force driving the current is voltage—a difference in potential energy between two points in a circuit.

    That analogy works for direct current, anyway. But in most grids, electrical power is transmitted with alternating voltage. That means the negative and positive poles flip back and forth, causing the electrons to endlessly lurch forward and backward instead of traveling in a continuous stream.

    As you can imagine, that makes alternating current more complicated to deal with. So Edison had a point: Direct current is much simpler. In fact, anyone can make a DC circuit. All you need is a battery and a wire to connect the positive and negative electrodes. You can even make your own battery. Just get two different metals, like zinc and copper, and stick them in opposite ends of a potato. The acid in the potato juice reacts differently with the two metals, creating a tiny amount of voltage—enough to light up a small LED. DC is easy.

    Direct-Current Toaster

    For example, suppose you wanted to create a DC toaster. A toaster is basically a box with a wire inside that gets hot when current runs through it. And let’s say this toaster requires 1,000 watts of power. Oh, power? That's the time (t) rate of energy (E). So if you put 1 joule of energy into a wire in 1 second, that would be 1 watt of power (P):

    Rhett Allain

    For electrical power in particular, we can calculate that as the product of the electric current (I) and the voltage (V):

    Rhett Allain

    With that, we can draw a simple toaster circuit diagram:

    Rhett Allain

    The nichrome wire inside the toaster is not a good conductor. It impedes the flow of current, causing the wire to heat up. So it’s basically a device for converting electrical energy into thermal energy. In the diagram above, R stands for the amount of resistance, which is measured in ohms.

    So let's say our DC power supply runs at 10 volts. We can use this to find the level of resistance needed to get our toast nice and toasty. There is a relationship between the current (I) and voltage (V) for a resistor called Ohm's law, and that gives us the following expression for power:

    Rhett Allain

    With 10 volts, we need a resistance of 0.1 ohms (which is tiny) to get a power of 1,000 watts. But wait—it’s not just the heating element inside that creates resistance in the circuit. The power cord that you plug into the wall also has resistance. The copper wire inside the cord is a good conductor, but the length of the cord itself increases the resistance.

    To make things easy, imagine that the power cord also has a 0.1-ohm resistance, so the total resistance in the circuit is 0.2 ohms. That means we’d get a lower electrical current, and the power to the toaster would be just 250 watts. That's going to be some un-toasty toast.

    To fix this, we have to increase the voltage of the power source. Let's ramp that up to 100 volts. In that case our toaster could be 10 ohms, so the 0.1-ohm power cord won't matter much. Well, it's not a problem for a 3-foot power cord in your home. But what about the transmission lines from the power station to your town? These can be over 100 kilometers long.

    With much longer wires you get much more resistance, which means those wires will get hot and waste energy. Again, the solution is to use a higher-voltage source. Remember P = IV ? That says you can deliver the same power by having a stupid-high voltage with stupid-low current.

    Yes, you solve one problem and it just makes another problem. Suppose the wall outlet is 10,000-volt DC. Oh, but you want to charge your phone, and it needs 5-volt DC. How do you do that? OK, there is a way to make it work. You could put a large resistor in series with your phone and it would convert electrical energy to heat. But again, that’s just throwing away energy.

    Alternating-Current Toaster

    So what happens if we switch to alternating current? Remember, AC circuits are created by flipping the positive and negative poles back and forth, so the voltage alternates between a positive value and a negative value (meaning the direction of electron flow changes). Here is a plot of voltage as a function of time for the two types of current.

    Rhett Allain

    The DC source has a constant voltage, so that’s the flat blue line above. The AC source (red) has a voltage that oscillates between +10 and –10 volts, and there are times when the voltage is actually zero. In this made-up example, you can see that the voltage switches eight times in half a second. Real household AC varies, but in the US it averages around 120 volts (plus and minus) with a frequency of 60 hertz.

    If we take our toaster and plug it into a 60-Hz AC outlet, it’ll run just fine. Since it works by just making a wire hot, it doesn't matter if it has DC or AC current—either way it gets hot. Same for incandescent light bulbs. In fact, they’re really not very different from toasters; it’s just that the thin tungsten wire in a bulb gets so hot (up to 4,500 degrees F) that it glows and produces light.

    AC Power Is More Efficient

    With AC, we still have the same problem with long power lines. You need to have high voltage and low current so you don't lose too much energy from hot wires. But AC has a nice advantage: It's easy to take that high voltage and change it to a low voltage. This is possible because of the oscillating nature of the current and Faraday’s law of induction.

    Faraday's law says that if you change the strength of a magnetic field inside a loop of wire, you will produce an electric current. In the clip below, you can see that when I stick a strong magnet into a coil of wire or pull it out, the current level (measured in amps) jumps up.

    Rhett Allain

    You can also do this without a magnet if you use two coils of wire. In the video below, I’m connecting and disconnecting a little coin battery to a primary coil. (You can’t see the coils, but they’re inside the small gray box in the foreground.)

    The secondary coil isn’t connected to any power source. But the changing current in the primary coil makes a changing magnetic field, and that induces a current in the secondary coil. Even with this tiny battery you can see that I get a big induced current. Check it out:

    Rhett Allain

    But that’s not all! We can change the voltage induced in the second coil by changing the ratio of the number of loops in each coil. If the induced coil has 100 loops and the primary coil has 1,000 loops, the induced voltage will be 100/1,000 or 0.1 times the input. If you reverse that, you can get an output voltage that is 10 times the input.

    We call this a transformer (because it transforms the voltage). They are kind of a big deal. Here's what a small one looks like inside:

    Rhett Allain

    This is one of those “power bricks” that all your gadgets use to plug into a wall socket. The two coils are side by side, and you can see that the one on the right has more “turns” than the one on the left. So, if you have a 120-volt AC input, the output will be lower (in this case it's 12 volts). There's some other stuff in there that takes that lower-voltage AC and turns it into a DC output; that's called a voltage rectifier.

    Just to be clear, you can't use an AC transformer with a DC circuit. I mean it's technically possible to take a DC input, convert it to AC, and then transform it—but why do the extra stuff when you can just deliver AC power to houses? That's exactly what we do. When you see those giant high-voltage transmission lines, they are super-high-voltage AC circuits.

    So here's how it works. You have some power station that runs on fossil fuels or hydroelectric or whatever. You need to make this an AC output and then ramp up the voltage to something crazy like 100,000 volts. This means you can send it on the long power lines at very low current so there isn't much power loss.

    When a power line gets to a town, it goes into a substation. This is basically just another giant transformer that reduces the AC voltage to something more manageable, like 10,000 volts. Finally, the current goes through one more transformer to get it to the 240-volt AC that enters your house. Big appliances like clothes dryers use the whole 240 V, and for your electrical outlets that gets cut in half to give you 120 V.

    But none of this would be possible with DC power. It just wouldn't be practical. AC rules!

    Best Fitness Trackers (2025), Tested and Reviewed

    by: Adrienne So

    Whether you’re skiing in the backcountry or trampolining in the backyard, we have an activity tracker for you.

    The Best Fitness Trackers and Watches for Everyone

    Whether you’re skiing in the backcountry or trampolining in the backyard, we have an activity tracker for you.

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    Featured in this article
    Best Overall
    Fitbit Charge 6
    Read more
    Runner-Up
    Garmin Vivoactive 6
    Read more
    Best Smart Ring
    Oura Ring 4
    Read more
    A Screenless Band
    Whoop MG Fitness Band
    Read more
    Show more
    4 / 14

    Other Fitness Trackers to Consider

    Photograph: Adrienne So

    Garmin Instinct 3 for $400: Garmin's Instinct line doesn't have as many high-end features as the Fenix 8, but it's popular because it's cheaper and it has a cool, chunky retro aesthetic that I love. This year's updates include the built-in flashlight and a new reinforced bezel, which is good considering that I still managed to bang up the Fenix and Epix watches quite a bit. For more information, check out our guide to the Best Garmin Watches.

    Apple Watch Ultra 2 for $799: Apple did not significantly upgrade its rugged outdoor watch this year (8/10, WIRED Recommends) beyond giving it a very cool new black finish, but it is still the best outdoors watch if you have an iPhone. It has a faster chipset, second-gen ultra-wideband chip, and compatibility with WatchOS 26, with AI-enabled personalized health recommendations.

    Garmin Venu 3 for $350: There's nothing wrong with Garmin's pricier premium hybrid fitness tracker-sports watch. However, its standout feature is that you can take calls from your wrist, and when I tried it with my spouse, he said it sounded like I was calling from the bottom of a barrel. There are other Garmins with similar functionality that are better-priced.

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    OnePlus Watch 3 for $287: My kingdom for a smartwatch that can last more than a day! The OnePlus Watch 3 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) can last for five days on a single charge. OnePlus now includes many by-now standard health features, like fall detection, a skin temperature sensor, irregular heart rate notifications, and an electrocardiogram. This is another great pick if you want a smartwatch that's also a good fitness tracker.

    Suunto Run for $249: I love how light and slim this watch is (36 grams), especially in the now sold-out Lime. It has a bright AMOLED screen, two weeks of battery life, and accurate dual-frequency satellites. But Suunto's software is clunky and difficult to navigate when compared to Garmin's, Coros's, or Apple's. Offline maps are also not supported.

    Amazfit Bip 6 for $80: Amazfit's trackers are improving so quickly! Like the Active 2, the Bip 6 is a gorgeous little watch, with a brilliant, big, and responsive AMOLED screen, well over a week of battery life, and 140 sport modes. I still find the tracker and the Zepp app to occasionally be laughably inaccurate, but it's cheap and comfortable and works well. However, for only $20 more, I'd just get the Active 2 instead.

    Xiaomi Smart Band 9 for $59: I was shocked by how much I liked this affordable little fitness band. The 1,200-nit display is clear and bright, and the touchscreen is responsive. The aluminum case feels sturdy, and it tracks your steps and heart rate with reasonable accuracy. However, there's just no comparing the user experience of the Mi Fitness app versus Fitbit's, especially at this price. (Yet.)

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra for $650: Your eyes have not deceived you. Samsung has made a Galaxy Watch Ultra (7/10, WIRED Review) that is a direct rip-off of the Apple Watch Ultra, but for Samsung phone owners. It even has the same safety orange band, the Quick button (which Apple calls an Action button), and the Double Pinch feature (which Apple calls Double Tap). Apple's watch is better, with more sports, a better interface, and better comprehensive algorithms like Training Load and Vitals. However, what the Galaxy Watch Ultra does, it does well, and Samsung has the resources to catch up quickly. It has a sapphire glass face that's rated to 10 ATM, an IP68 rating, and the ability to withstand elevations as high as 9,000 meters and temperatures as high as 130 degrees. It also has backcountry navigation features, dual-band GPS, a compass, and breadcrumb navigation, which Samsung calls Track Back and which Apple calls Backtrack (this is getting silly). The battery life is still just an adequate two days and change, though.

    Buyer Beware

    Photograph: Amazon

    Evie Movano Ring for $269: Evie recently announced an upgraded version of the Movano, with a medical-journal-trained AI chatbot and improved sleep and heart rate tracking. I tested it and unfortunately did not find enough on offer to rescind my previous opinion (4/10, WIRED Review). The smart ring market has exploded since then, and many new rings have explicitly women-centered features. It simply doesn't offer enough features to be an attractive product right now.

    Amazfit T-Rex 3 for $280, Amazfit Helio for $170, and Amazfit Balance for $150: I have tried all the older watches across Amazfit's lineup, and my colleague Simon Hill has tried the company's smart ring. While I have nothing to complain about regarding the build quality—the Balance is a dupe for the Samsung Galaxy Watch if you don't look too hard—both Hill and I found functionality somewhat limited and were exasperated at the subscription upselling. The Active 2 is the only Amazfit watch I like right now.

    FAQs

    What's the difference between a fitness tracker and a smartwatch?

    The categories can overlap significantly, but fitness trackers as we consider them here are, well, focused on health. I'm less concerned with whether a fitness tracker can replicate every feature on your smartphone than if the suite of health features is robust and accurate; if it can track multiple activities; and if it stays on and is secure while doing multiple fitness activities. We also include fitness trackers that aren't wrist wearables, which includes the Whoop, smart rings, heart rate monitors, and blood sugar monitors.

    Some wrist-based fitness trackers will feature the ability to read emails and control music, but the screens are often smaller and less bright. However, the battery life is often much better, which makes a difference, especially if you're tracking your sleep over time. If, however, you're more interested in the option to access apps without having to pull out your phone, you might want to think about getting a smartwatch. (If you want no notifications at all, get a smart ring instead.) Don't see anything that's exactly your style here? Check out our Best Smartwatches guide.

    My tracker doesn't work! What should I do?

    Here are just a few ways you can easily cure what ails you (or your device):

    • Make sure it fits. Optical sensors won't work if your device is slipping loosely around your wrist. You can customize most devices with new straps. Make sure it sits securely an inch above your wrist.
    • Wash it! I'm horrified by how many people tell me their fitness trackers are giving them a wrist rash. Wipe it down with a little dish soap and water after a sweaty session.
    • Get out from under tree cover. Does your device utilize multiple satellite positioning systems to track your location when you're starting an outdoor workout? This is a lot harder for it to do if you're under power lines, trees, or even (gulp) inside.
    • Set a routine. There's nothing quite as frustrating as opening your tracker's app and finding out that it ran out of battery before you went to bed last night. Keep your app updated regularly. Check if your tracker is connected to your phone, and keep chargers everywhere.

    Does my strap have PFAS?

    A study published in December 2024 found that many smartwatch wrist bands contain high levels of PFHxA, which is a “forever chemical” that can affect your immune, thyroid, kidney, and reproductive systems. How do you know if your band has PFHxA?

    • Check if the band is labeled as being made of “fluoroelastomer.” Fluorinated synthetic rubber is the material that has the highest levels of PFHxA.
    • Check if the company has tested its products. For example, Garmin's watches do not have PFAS.
    • If you're not certain, most trackers let you swap out your bands for those made from silicone, metal, leather, or other materials. Companies often have their own proprietary accessories; if you need some ideas on what to look for, check out our Best Apple Watch Accessories guide.

    14 Best Couches We've Tested That You Can Buy Online (2025)

    by: Louryn Strampe

    Refresh your space with a comfy sofa that arrives right at your doorstep.

    14 Great Couches You Can Buy Online

    Refresh your space with a comfy sofa that arrives right at your doorstep.

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    Featured in this article
    Big and Sturdy
    Albany Park Barton Sofa
    Read more
    Well-Made Luxury
    Benchmade Modern Tyler Sofa
    Read more
    Comfy Modernism
    Trule Armless Large Microfiber Leather 3-Seat Bean Bag Sofa
    Read more
    Standout Designs
    The Inside Modern Sofa
    Read more
    Show more
    4 / 15

    More Couches We Tested

    Photograph: Albany Park

    Albany Park Kova for $1,958: The Kova is easy to assemble because you just have to connect hooks, which means disassembly is easy too. The system allows for modular add-ons like corners or consoles. There are two fabric swatches and several velvet color options to choose from. The back and seat cushions are super comfy, and deep—for reference, I'm 6'4", and there's enough cushion and room to nap with my wife and dog on this couch side by side. After a year, it held up well. The problem is that the cushions and seats don't stay put, so it's a constant exercise of adjusting them. There's also a slight gap between the assembled seats, which you'll need to push together every so often. The seats flatten out too quickly for my liking, so you need to fluff them up too. It's a lot. The wood frame inside the mattress isn't that durable—I rested my knee on the frame once and the wood caved in a little. Welp. Be gentle. Despite all this, the Kova is a comfortable, great-looking sofa for a nice price, if you don't mind micromanaging it. —Julian Chokkattu

    Couch Accessories We Like

    Chom-Chom Roller for $28: We’ve been recommending this pet-hair remover in our Cat Toys Guide for years, and for good reason—it uses an electrostatic charge rather than tape or battery-powered suction to make short work of any amount of pet hair. It cleans up my large velvet sectional in just a couple of minutes, and I never have to worry about charging a hand vacuum or replacing an adhesive lint roller. —Kat Merck

    CouchConsole Drink & Snack Tray for $60: No room next to your couch for an end table? Plop down with this portable caddy and you’ll be in brain-rot bliss in no time. It’s got a gyroscopic cup holder, nonskid surface for a remote or mug, a slot for propping up your phone, a food-safe cup for snacks, and even a USB-C port to which you can hook up a portable charger. Even though I have a coffee table, I still use one of these on my couch to avoid having to get up and disturb the inevitable cat on my lap. —Kat Merck

    Anker Power Strip for $16: Former WIRED reviewer Eric Ravenscraft implored us all to put a little power cube under our couch. And he was right. Having a base station like this one will improve your life in small but undeniably convenient ways. It has three AC outlets, plus some USB-C and USB-A ports, so you’ll always be able to top off your gear at a moment’s notice. And if your living room is like mine, and the outlet situation isn’t ideal, you won’t have to stretch your charging cord halfway across the room anymore.

    Why Should I Buy a Couch Online?

    Buying a new sofa online comes with a lot of benefits. Usually there are more customization options and a wider selection to choose from. Oftentimes it's cheaper than buying outright in-store, too. The biggest bonus is probably that you get delivery, which means you don't have to rent a U-Haul or beg a friend with a truck. If you choose to assemble it yourself, you can do it at your own pace, and if you choose white-glove delivery, they'll just plop your furniture wherever it needs to go. Unless you're near a showroom, you lose out on the benefit of being able to try it in person, but most couch retailers have a trial period so you can return it for free if you end up disliking it.

    What Should I Do Before Purchasing?

    Before you order, measure the area where it will be (a few times!) and consider putting masking tape down to get a feel for the dimensions if you're struggling to visualize them. If you'll be assembling the sofa yourself, consider having a friend help you put it together. (I've successfully put together a lot of sofas on my own, but it goes faster with a pal.) Consider your fabric as well. Performance fabrics are more durable and easier to clean, but they aren't as soft and luxurious as some other finishes like chenille or microfiber. Many couch manufacturers have swatch books available so you can experience the color and texture in-person before committing. After you order but before you get delivery, be sure you clear your space.

    How We Tested and What's Up Next

    Testing couches is a Herculean effort, so our team researched popular or unique couches online and split up the task of testing them. Each tester used their couch in their own homes for a minimum of one month (though usually much longer). We jumped on them. We napped on them. We sat on them with our friends and family. Whenever possible, we assembled them ourselves. We're constantly in the process of testing new couches, and we're testing additional models from Room & Board, Jonathan Adler, Crate & Barrel, West Elm, Ikea, and Pottery Barn. We're also on the hunt for some nice slipcovers. If there's a sofa you're curious about, let us know in the comments.

    Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting and exclusive subscriber content that's too important to ignore. Subscribe Today.

    Confessions of a Recovering AI Porn Addict

    by: Jason Parham

    A “gooner” tells WIRED he became hooked on the cartoonish nature of AI porn. Several addiction experts say the genre could pose a problem for people prone to compulsive sexual behavior.

    Watching porn on mobile phone blurred image of mobile phone with porn scenes. Watching porn adult TV channel

    Confessions of a Recovering AI Porn Addict

    A “gooner” tells WIRED he became hooked on the cartoonish nature of AI porn. Several addiction experts say the genre could pose a problem for people prone to compulsive sexual behavior.

    Photograph: Getty Images

    Kyle’s interest in AI porn began last summer as he circled rock bottom. From the outside, everything seemed fine. He was in a committed relationship with his longtime girlfriend. He enjoyed the perks of his job working for a sports betting company. Still, all he could think about was fueling his porn addiction in new ways—even at the cost of feeling mentally drained and tired. “Pretty much all I wanted to do was doomscroll on my phone and watch content. And I wasn’t able to stop, even though I noticed that it was a problem. I became desensitized,” he says. “I was looking for that next dose of excitement.”

    That’s when he came across an Instagram Reel showing an AI-generated image of a woman with “extremely large breasts the size of her body,” he says. He knew it was fake but also felt strangely seduced by it. “In the back of my mind, I was like, OK, I do find this kind of attractive,” he says. “It was something I had not seen before—and I had to see more.”

    Kyle is a “gooner,” a term for someone who finds pleasure from prolonged sessions of intense masturbation. The 26-year-old, who asked to be identified by his first name citing privacy concerns, says that at the peak of his addiction he would force himself to masturbate “either out of habit, obligation, or desire.” The Instagram Reel led him down a rabbit hole of dreamlike pleasure as he searched for AI porn that depicted “women with cartoonish boobs, areolas, and nipples twice the size of the rest of her torso, [and] super wide hips.”

    When we speak over the phone one recent afternoon in July, Kyle tells me he always had an interest in surrealism—“things that are just completely unnatural and not possible in real life”—and that AI unlocked his appetite tenfold. On Reddit he started commenting on r/BustyAIBabes and would often take time out of work to check X and Instagram, or cycle through Xvideos late at night, while his girlfriend slept, for “POV stuff, blowjob videos, and jerk off inspiration,” he says. “I started looking for more taboo things, such as AI porn. And then it got to a point where that didn't arouse me anymore. So I had to search for even more AI.”

    Porn sites are some of the most-visited online, according to a 2023 study, and as AI has gone mainstream, so have concerns around the risks that this growing genre of adult entertainment presents for people who suffer from compulsive sexual behavior disorder (CSBD), the official term recognized by the American Psychiatric Association. Porn addiction, as it is commonly referred to, is not considered an official diagnosis and is not currently listed among the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the APA’s approved guidebook; it’s a contested topic within academic circles. Still, people report feeling out of control with their porn consumption; a meta-analysis published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2018 found that those who express concerns about porn addiction are often actually experiencing distress over their religion-based moral beliefs surrounding pornography.

    The spread of AI porn poses “intriguing yet concerning implications,” says Leor Ram, a therapist at Integrative Psychotherapy Group in Beverly Hills, California. “We already live in a society where people are growing increasingly accustomed to having what they want, when they want it. While that’s convenient for many aspects of life, it’s detrimental to relationships and community.” Like other mental health professionals who spoke to WIRED, he says the problem has less to do with its proliferation and more to do with its capacity to magnify preexisting vulnerabilities toward compulsive or unhealthy behaviors. “There’s every reason to anticipate its growing presence as the technology becomes more sophisticated, personalized, and accessible.”

    In June, a member of the subreddit NoFap—a porn addiction peer support forum for people who suffer from CSBD, specifically gooners—warned against the use of AI porn.

    “Came across the devil himself and you know they say the road to hell is really fun,” they posted to the group, which has 1.2 million members. “Stay the fuck away from that shit guys … It’s going to get harder to avoid because it captures all your vices and traps you.”

    “Already went down that rabbit hole, super hard to get out of it,” one member replied.

    “Agreed,” wrote another. “AI porn is insane and insanely addictive.”

    Ross Crothers, a therapist who specializes in queer- and trans-affirming care in East Los Angeles, believes AI porn will change how people approach relationships, “or rather, avoid them,” he says.

    Once the neural pathway between AI and sexual pleasure is firmly established, he adds, “it almost becomes too efficient. This causes other sexual experiences to shift and become less pleasurable in comparison. This is where we will see more avoidance of relationships and an increase in isolation.”

    Kyle says his girlfriend, who he has been with for seven years, began to notice a distance growing between them this year that started to negatively affect their sex life. “My erections weren't as strong as they could have been. I couldn’t last as long,” he says. “And I never directly told her what I was exactly struggling with. But I could sense that there was less attraction there than there had been before. She had gotten the proverbial ick.”

    Outside of Reddit threads, though, AI-specific porn addiction isn’t currently dominating the clinical landscape. “We’re not seeing a surge of cases in our practice yet,” says Rob Terry, a sex addiction therapist and founder of Karuna Healing in St. George, Utah. “But it does come up here and there.” Still, several experts WIRED spoke with say they believe it is “only a matter of time” before the effects of AI-generated porn become a larger issue.

    AI erotica is a quickly developing genre. AI generators and nudifying apps, like Undress.cc, have contributed to the prevalence of AI porn while also raising ethical concerns around the use of nonconsensual deepfakes. An analysis by Indicator, which investigated 85 nudify websites, found that the industry is pulling in an estimated $36 million per year.

    On Pornhub, one of the most visited websites in the world, AI porn is restricted to animated content. Current protocol allows for AI content only from the original creators; they are required to undergo a verification process before uploading videos. “We ask that people prove it’s their work,” says Alex Kekesi, Pornhub’s vice president of brand and community. But even the content uploaded within those restrictions has found an audience, from hyperreal fantasies (“Fucked a bitch without a spine and I liked it”) to smutty reimaginings of Marvel characters (“Spider Gwen’s First Lesson in Love”). Hentai—a genre of porn content that includes exaggerated video game and anime characters—is currently the most searched term on the site in the US, according to Pornhub. In 2024, Gen Z were 193 percent more likely to view Hentai content compared to all other age groups.

    Everywhere, it seems, interest around the subject is intensifying. Since April, search traffic on YouTube for “AI porn” has been the highest in Sweden, Australia, and Canada, according to Google Trends. More recently, the Supreme Court’s decision upholding Texas’ porn ID law—which is similar to laws in at least 20 other states and requires adult websites to verify their users are at least 18—has raised the question of whether some people may instead make AI porn at home, bypassing these platforms altogether. Its increasing ability to create hyperreal sexual images, catered specifically to a person’s desires, can now produce porn that is just as orgasmic as any human-generated video floating around on aggregator sites. Companion apps like Nomi and Replika are also being used as alternatives to build intimate relationships and have sex with AI bots.

    But “AI porn, in itself, is not necessarily a problem,” says Paula Hall, a psychotherapist at London’s Laurel Centre, the leading specialist provider of treatment for CSBD in the UK, “but rather the way in which it is used.”

    As people become more accustomed to getting what they want from realistic AI renderings of porn, in addition to the buffet of erotic media that already exists across the internet, human connection, for some, may no longer be enough, says Monifa Ellis-Addie, a therapist at Banyan Therapy Group in Los Angeles, a faith-based counseling practice. In the most extreme cases, mental health professionals say that an increased dependency will enable people to fully detach. “The effects are going to be pretty damaging,” Ellis-Addie says. For some people, sex addiction is built on a kind of “faux intimacy,” she continues. “AI is only going to make that easier. It’s going to feel as if you’re dealing with an actual person, and with an actual person comes things like actual feelings. It will make people more distant in real life.”

    Kyle’s epiphany that it was time to finally temper his addiction came during a work trip to New York City in February. He was alone in a hotel, away from his girlfriend, and, he says, “I just kept doing it and doing it, but I didn’t feel any better.” He’s since taken action to limit his need to masturbate, including joining the Reddit support group NoFap, where members share similar struggles.

    Professionals believe that could make initiating new IRL relationships more difficult.

    Young people are currently facing a mental health crisis. Last year, the US surgeon general called for a warning label on all social media platforms. One major consequence has been a “loneliness epidemic,” according to a 2024 Harvard study, which suggested that people who feel more alone suffer from higher rates of depression and anxiety.

    “Social media has distorted our views on so many things—body image, social class, politics. It’s hurt people in many ways,” says Daniel Glazer, a psychotherapist at Fifth Ave Psychiatry in New York, citing loneliness, isolation, depression, shame, and issues related to sexual performance as areas of concern. What’s happening with AI porn “could be another extension of that,” he adds.

    But AI also has the potential for real “positive crossover” for people who struggle with relationships, both platonic and romantic. “I understand sex addiction as a way to avoid life, a way to avoid relationships. So AI can be a kind of a bridge to someone who’s fearful of a relationship,” Glazer says. “Here’s a relationship that isn’t scary and one where you won’t be criticized.” They’ll just have to manage their reliance on it.

    More recently, Kyle has fully curbed his intake of adult content. Though AI porn is still in its early days, he considers it “one of the worst technological developments that we have coming up right now” because of its over accessibility. “It’s worse than the real thing.”

    14 Best Office Chairs of 2025— I’ve Tested Nearly 60 to Pick Them

    by: Julian Chokkattu

    Sitting at a desk for hours? Upgrade your WFH setup and work in style with these comfy WIRED-tested seats.

    The 14 Best Office Chairs

    Sitting at a desk for hours? Upgrade your WFH setup and work in style with these comfy WIRED-tested seats.

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    Featured in this article
    Best Home Office Chair for Most
    Branch Ergonomic Chair Pro
    Read more
    A Premium Office Chair
    Steelcase Gesture
    Read more
    Best Budget Office Chair
    Branch Ergonomic Chair
    Read more
    Best Office Chair for Long Hours
    Herman Miller Aeron
    Read more
    Show more
    4 / 14

    How to Sit Properly at a Desk

    It's not just about finding a chair you like. We've rounded up several tips on how to set up your desk properly here, but here are a few highlights.

    Sitting for too long in a day is not good for your health, no matter what chair you use. It increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, stroke, and heart disease. The best thing you can do is get up and move every half hour. If you can, a 40-minute walk per day can, according to a recent study, make a big difference in countering some effects of a sedentary lifestyle. You probably don't need to bother with an active chair. Our recommendation? Try a smartwatch. Most have movement reminders that encourage you to stretch your legs. If you're dealing with back pain, your first step is to consult your physician.

    Make sure your chair's armrests are adjustable. Your palms should be elevated over your desk, which should be elbow-level, and your wrists should be straight. If the bottom of your palm is resting on the desk or wrist rest, there's a chance you're putting too much pressure on your nerves, which could lead to issues like carpal tunnel syndrome. Talk to your physician if you're feeling any kind of pain. A gaming mouse, often more ergonomic than a standard mouse, might be helpful; just make sure to find one that fits your palm size.

    When you look forward, your eyes should align with the top of your monitor or laptop. That might mean finding a chair that can adjust up and down, elevating your laptop with a stand, or raising the height of your monitor. This puts less pressure on your neck and spine—you shouldn't be craning your neck up or down.

    What Should I Look for in an Office Chair?

    A good rule of thumb is that the more adjustable a chair is, the better. Now, that doesn't mean this chair is the absolute best, but it gives you the possibility to mold it to your body shape, which hopefully makes it a comfier and more supportive seat. Here's what you can expect to adjust on a chair.

    Armrests: Most chairs let you move the armrests side to side, up and down, forward and back. It's even nicer when you're able to lock the armrest into place so that they don't slide around as your elbows rest on them. The armrest should naturally allow your palms to slightly hover over the desk. You'll often see descriptors like “4D” and “5D adjustable armrests,” which denotes how many directions you can adjust the armrest.

    Seat height: It's worth checking a chair's maximum and minimum height before you buy because they might not work for your current desk (unless you have a standing desk where you can adjust the height). This is usually a pneumatic lift lever under the chair—pull the lever and get off the seat to let the chair go up, then sit on it and pull the lever to bring it down to your preference. Your feet should be planted on the floor at a 90- or 100-degree angle. If your chair arrives and it doesn't get as high as you'd like, don't worry, there's a very simple fix. Some office chair brands offer “tall cylinders" for not a lot of money, and if not, you can usually find third-party options on retailers like Amazon (make sure you buy for your specific chair!). Simply swap your existing cylinder with the tall version, and you'll have a greater height range to work with. You may be able to choose this option before checking out, or reach out to the company to see if they can swap it for you.

    Seat depth: Seat depth is important for taller folks. This is usually a mechanism that lets you pull the seat out so that your thighs get the proper support. There should be 1 to 2 inches between the front of the seat and the back of your knees. Taller people with longer legs may not get the best support if you can't adjust the seat depth.

    Seat tilt: This isn't as common as the above adjustments but it's designed to tilt the seat of the chair up or down. This can help posture and prevent back pain, though it can take some getting used to.

    Lumbar support: Most office chairs offer lumbar support, which can look like a separate piece attached to the backrest that can slide up and down. This piece supports your lower back (the lumbar region!), specifically maintaining the curve of the spine to maintain good posture as you sit and, ideally, warding off back pain. Check your chair manufacturer's assembly instructions to learn how to adjust the lumbar support (it's not the same on every chair), and place the support on the curve of your lower back. What I like to do is run my hand along my spine until I reach the natural dip, then I try to make sure the lumbar support sits at that exact location. Some chairs also let you adjust the depth of the lumbar support, pushing it further inward or outward. Make sure it feels natural and that it's not digging in. Play around with this until it feels comfortable and natural. Your shoulders should align with your hips, and you shouldn't feel like you're leaning forward.

    Recline: Almost every office chair lets you lock or unlock the recline, but some chairs go a step further and let you tweak the tension of the recline. This allows you to use more or less force when you lean back, which comes down to how much resistance you want when you lean back.

    How We Test Office Chairs

    My home office is often filled with at least four or five chairs at any given time. It takes me a while to test them because I prefer to sit on these office chairs for more than two weeks at a bare minimum, though that often extends into a month. It's hard to gauge the supportiveness of a chair by sitting on it for less than a week. I adjust it to my 6'4" preferences, and sometimes have my 5'1" wife sit on it for her two cents. I try out all the adjustments throughout the testing period, too. It's not just about the chair; aesthetics are important, and I also research these companies, looking into their warranties, customer service, and overall reliability.

    How Does WIRED Select Chairs to be Reviewed?

    I routinely look at the market to find new office chairs that have hit the scene, whether it's from a newcomer or an established brand like Herman Miller. I typically reach out to these companies to ask for the product, but I do not promise any kind of editorial coverage—that goes against WIRED's editorial polcies. Yes, WIRED earns affiliate revenue if you purchase an office chair using our link, but this is not factored into the decision process when ranking chairs.

    As much as I'd like to test and review every single chair, it's just not feasible with our resources. You may find some notable missing options in this guide, like the Steelcase Leap. I'll be testing it in the future, and will gradually try to evaluate all the top options in the market.

    After I've finished testing a chair, I typically donate it to a local Goodwill. I keep a handful of top recommendations on hand so that I can reevaluate them or compare them to other newer options, like the Branch Ergonomic Chair Pro, Herman Miller Embody, and Anthros V2.

    Accessories for Your Chair

    Replace Your Casters
    • Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
    • Photograph: Stealtho

    The wheels on the bottom of your chair are among the easiest parts to replace. If your current casters don't roll smoothly or are too loud, it might be worth replacing them instead of buying a whole new chair. I like these from Stealtho, a Ukrainian company. They'll work with nearly every office chair, though the company notes they don't work with Ikea chairs. The soft polyurethane material means these won't scratch or chip hardwood floors, as some plastic casters do, plus it'll feel like you're silently gliding as you roll from your desk to the fridge (don't judge).

    Fair warning: Since these are more frictionless than normal casters, they can cause your chair to roll around sometimes, like when you stand up and walk away. Stealtho has locking casters if you're worried about your chair rolling, and they don't cost much more.

    An Office Chair for Your Pet
    • Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    SeatMate

    Pet Office Chair

    Does your pet longingly look at your fast-typing fingers and wish for scritches? Get SeatMate's Pet Office Chair if you don't want to feel like a cruel, cruel pet owner. This faux fur seat gets high enough that you won't have to bend down to pet your dog or cat when they inevitably enter your home office to distract you. Instead, they'll sit at a reasonable height that allows you to have one hand running through their fur, while the other tries very hard to work a keyboard and mouse simultaneously. There's a pull-out ramp that lets them clamber up, and my dog instantly took to it, though now he's so used to it he jumps straight onto the seat. The back legs of the seat are on wheels, making it easier to move around a room.

    You can choose different fabric materials and colors, and it's easy to clean with a brush or hand vacuum. Just keep sizing in mind. My dog is 19 pounds and a little long, and it just fits him when he sleeps.

    A Glass Chair Mat
    Vitrazza Glass Mat for office chairs
    Photograph: Vitrazza

    Vitrazza

    Rectangle Glass Chair Mat

    Do you need a mat for your chair? Most likely not. However, casters can scuff up hard floors, which is why we recommend upgrading them to rollerblade wheels (see above). If you're on a carpet, it can also be hard to move around on the chair. A mat can help with both of these issues. I sat on top of this glass one from Vitrazza for two years and was pleasantly surprised. (You can go for much cheaper mats made from other materials, too.) The safety glass is thick, and I did not see any notable scratches even after that time. It holds 1,000 pounds and doesn't touch my hardwood floor, as you need to affix rubber bumpers to keep them apart. You can choose from several sizes, and Vitrazza sells various shapes too. It's just a bit difficult to clean since you have to lift it up to get to all the dirt underneath.

    Seat Cushions, Backrests, and Footrests

    CushionLab Seat Cushion

    Photograph: Cushionlabs

    If you can't upgrade your seat just yet, a cushion or backrest might help. Here are a few we like:

    CushionLab Seat Cushion for $75: This memory foam seat is comfortable, and I had no problems sitting on it for hours on end. It's best paired with an adjustable chair, as it adds a decent amount of height to your seat, which might make typing on a keyboard awkward. It does a great job of keeping out bad odors, and you can also wash the cover. Just know that it's rarely sold for its full price of $85, which means it isn't really on “sale.”

    LoveHome Memory Foam Lumbar Support for $22: If you slouch in your seat, this comfortable memory foam pillow can help. It keeps your back straight and supported, and as it's affordable, it's a great option to try before shelling out hundreds for a new chair. It's good to use in a car or a wheelchair, too. The cover is washable, and it has two adjustable straps (plus an extension strap) that go around your seat to keep it in the position you need.

    Secretlab Premium Footrest for $89: I have tried a handful of footrests, and Secretlab's Premium Footrest is easily the best—I have been using mine for more than three years. Ideally, your feet are planted on the ground as you sit, but it's nice to be able to prop them up on something soft every so often. Not only is the PlushCell memory foam material soft and cushy for my feet, but it also stays remarkably clean. I have a tiny dog, and his hair gets everywhere except the quilted fabric cover. (You can hand wash this cover to get dirt out.) The patterned silicone base does a good job of keeping it in place, too.

    Other Office Chairs to Consider

    Not every pick is a winner. Here are a few others we like enough to recommend, but they're not as good as our top picks above.

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    Autonomous ErgoChair Ultra 2 for $399: I've now sat on Autonomous’s 3D-printed ErgoChair Ultra 2 for over a month, and I’m pleasantly surprised. It’s a big improvement over the original Chair Ultra, which had a flat and hard seat. The Ultra V2’s seat is still not as cushy as some chairs, but it doesn't feel like I’m sitting on concrete. It has all of the adjustments you’d want, from seat depth to a recline lock, and I didn't encounter any back pain during my time in the chair. The all-mesh design offers good airflow, and the backrest is wide enough and doesn’t dig into my shoulders. The only flaw? Sometimes when I put too much pressure on the armrest (like when I'm getting up or shifting my weight), it goes down with a loud crack despite being locked in place. Also, Autonomous has a pretty lackluster two-year warranty despite the high price.

    Haworth Fern for $1,242: I think the Haworth Fern is best for shorter people (aka anyone not above 6 feet, like me). It's adjustable to the nth degree—you can even tilt the seat for a more upright sitting position!—but the seat itself was just wide enough for me, though it's plenty soft and pillowy. When I pulled out the seat depth to the max, it created a gap between the seat and the backrest, and I didn't love this feeling. The backrest is nice and soft, but I'd argue the lumbar support is quite aggressive. My back just felt like something was there all the time, and it felt distracting. I don't think you'd have these issues if you are shorter and narrower, and it's otherwise one of the softest office chairs I've sat on.

    Autonomous ErgoChair Pro for $399: Our top pick, the Branch Ergonomic Chair Pro, is a better buy, but if you need a headrest and want a wide seat, consider the Autonomous ErgoChair Pro. I sat on it for a month with no major problems, except that the box it came in was massive and barely fit through my front door. The levers under the chair also aren't super intuitive—I highly recommend checking out this video from the company when you first set it up to dial in your preferences. All the standard adjustments are present, from seat depth and lumbar support to fine-tuning the recline. What surprised me more was the ability to tilt the seat so it's angled down—you don't see that in many chairs. The overall build quality has been solid, and I even enjoyed the headrest when kicking back to watch House reruns during lunch. The only woes? I wish the arms stayed locked, as they can slide back and forth. While the foam seat is quite comfy, it can get warm in a toasty room (though the mesh back helps keep things cool). It's a shame this company has an abysmal warranty period.

    Staples Hyken for $140: The humble Hyken is frequently available for just $140 during big sale events, making it one of the most affordable good chairs out there. It reclines, has a breathable mesh fabric on the back and seat, and it's sturdy. You even get a headrest and lumbar support. After five years of continuous sitting, WIRED reviewers say the Hyken's mesh has compressed a bit, but it's still comfy. The Staples Dexley is slightly wider, so get it if you need a wider seat.

    Nouhaus Ergo3D for $370: This is another all-mesh chair. The ElastoMesh seat isn't as comfy as the Steelcase Karman (it'll feel worse on the skin if you, uh, tend to sit at your desk without pants), but it's otherwise quite adjustable and roomy, plus it even comes with two sets of wheels (casters or rollerblades) so you can choose which works best for you and your flooring. If you're in a particularly hot environment, it won't trap heat and will keep your whole body cool for a fraction of the price.

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    Haworth Breck for $419: I like Haworth's newest chair, the Breck. After sitting on it for a month, I didn't have problems (no back pain!), though I can safely say it's better suited for shorter people (roughly under 5'8"). That's because the Breck's seat is short, and the seat depth only extends an extra 2 inches. The weight-activated recline requires some push on your end, more than you might expect—it wasn't too hard for me, but lighter-weight people may find it problematic. The seat padding is thin, but I didn't see this as an issue even after hours of sitting. The best part is how amazingly simple it is to set up—no tools required! But my main gripe? Simply getting up from the seat causes the gas spring cylinder to loudly lift. This, and the fact that it tends to make some noises when I fidget around on the chair, makes it feel a little cheap.

    Branch Verve for $599: The Verve used to be a top pick above, but I think the Ergonomic Chair Pro is better value considering they're similar in price. It is elegant (especially in the lovely Coral and Cobalt colors), it keeps my back straight, and it's quite comfy. It can make nearly the same adjustments, but there's no seat tilt, and the armrests are much more limited. I also wouldn't have minded if the seat was a smidge wider—folks who need a wider seat may want to look elsewhere. I try to sit on these chairs for several weeks, if not months, but I rarely can sit on one for years, as I have so many to test. However, I have a colleague who owns the Verve who said that after more than two years, the chair started to sink whenever he sat on it. Thankfully, he says Branch's customer service was very responsive and promptly sent him a new cylinder.

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    Eureka Ergonomic Royal Chair for $450: Some folks chase that executive chair aesthetic—you know, plush leather and a high back so you can swivel around and reveal a cat in your lap as you laugh maniacally. This chair from Eureka fits the bill without costing a fortune, and it's been an OK chair for the month I've sat in it. The setup was quick, and the seat and back are soft and a little bouncy. I found my back sweaty after a few hours of sitting because there was just nowhere for body heat to go. The lumbar support isn't great, as prolonged sitting has left me with some sensations in my lower back. Not pain, just my back telling me I ought to get up. There's not much to adjust, but the recline and headrest. Also, if you need a wide seat, this is not the chair for you as the armrests will feel like they're boxing you in (it just fits me and I'm 6'4"). I thought this chair would look pretty poor after a month but it's easy to clean with a damp cloth, and the fake leather has held up. Too bad about the two-year warranty.

    Secretlab Titan Evo for $549: This gaming chair (7/10, WIRED Recommends) is classy enough for the home office. It sets itself apart from similarly priced competitors with its durability and flexibility. It’s comfortable for marathon gaming sessions, thanks to the adjustability it offers (particularly the lumbar support). The headrest pillow is magnetic and stays attached to the chair, which is a nice touch. But the firm, cold cure foam molds to your body and may not suit everyone. It will also make you feel sweaty.

    Allsteel O6 for $1,289: While this chair is eye-searingly expensive, every part—from the casters and the adjustments to the design—is incredibly refined. The adjustable lumbar support provided shockingly good support even for hours of work. My only complaint is that the armrest adjustments are a bit stiff, but besides that, this is an exceptional chair that’s comfortable and intuitive enough for me to completely forget about once I sit down and start working. Fair warning: This chair comes fully assembled, which is nice, but the box is massive. —Henri Robbins

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    Hinomi X1 for $729: Hinomi's X1 mesh chair has a trick up its sleeve—a built-in footrest! Just extend and flip out the footrest; voilà, your feet are now propped up. This might not be very practical for fellow tall people, as my legs often hit the wall behind my desk, but it's quite comfy. I also just didn't end up using the footrest as much as I thought. The chair is otherwise well-built. I like the lumbar support here, and there's a good amount of adjustments you can make. The seat itself is a bit firm, but I got used to it after some time. Hinomi offers a 12-year warranty, but best of all you can snag it in a dusty pink from the company’s website. I'd buy this over the X-Chair mesh chair listed below.

    Odinlake Ergo Max747 for $849: The Ergo Max747 is, all around, a great chair to sit in. The three-piece back provides great back support and comfort, and the easy-access paddles on either side of the seat make most adjustments quick and simple. Even sitting in this chair for hours, I never felt uncomfortable, whether I was sitting up or reclining (this chair reclines incredibly far, from 90 to 135 degrees). The bag holder in the back (which I typically used to hold a hat or small backpack) was a surprisingly nice touch, and the mesh backing and seat are breathable, preventing overheating during prolonged use. I still don’t know how I feel about the polished metal frame, and the inclusion of gloves for assembly makes me worry about how easily this seat will pick up smudges over the years, but the polished finish itself is spotless and well-executed. At 6'3", I had to max out the back height to comfortably sit in the chair. The secondary adjustments (back height, lumbar support, and headrest height) were awkward to adjust due to complicated ratcheting mechanisms keeping them in place. However, the comfort and breathability of this chair make it a compelling choice. —Henri Robbins

    Vari Task Chair for $399: Vari’s Task Chair is surprisingly comfy given its relatively simple construction. Former WIRED reviewer Medea Giordano tested it and asked her husband to use it during his long gaming sessions. They agreed that the angled back provides ample lumbar support to make those sessions comfortable. It also takes very little time to construct. You can recline a bit, but even at the lowest tension, it pushes you back up, and there’s no head support. It’s more for rocking than actually leaning. Her biggest gripe is that the armrests are quite hard. A little more padding would be a huge improvement.

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    Branch Softside for $299: I tested the high-back version of the Softside and like it a lot. It's different from all the other chairs in this guide, but comfy and cushiony. If you need a wider seat, this might not be the option for you as the armrests do box you in. There's not much to adjust, but my back didn't have any issues after weeks of sitting in this chair for full workdays. The build quality overall is OK. Considering it starts at $299, the overall seating experience, and the lovely design in fun colors, this is a pretty good value if you are after a soft and cushiony experience.

    BodyBilt Midcelli for $949: BodyBilt’s chair looks quite average, but the seat pad is plushy and soft, and it's contoured to your butt and legs, which I liked more than I expected. The mesh back has some give to it, so it doesn't feel rigid, and there are all the usual points of adjustment, including moving the seat forward and back. I wish the arms could lock to a position. It has a lifetime warranty on select parts, while other chair areas are covered for 12, seven, five, or three years. There are more customization options on BodyBilt's website—with the option to get a consultation—but I just think it's overpriced.

    Razer Fujin Pro for $1,050: Razer is asking Herman Miller and Steelcase prices despite offering a measly five-year warranty on this $1,000-plus chair. Still, my colleague Eric Ravenscraft likes the Fujin Pro (8/10, WIRED Recommends). There are a good number of adjustments you can make, the armrests are useful, and the mesh is breathable. Oh, and it doesn't have the overused gaming chair race-car seat aesthetic.

    Tempur-Pedic Tempur-Lumbar Support Office Chair for $352: I think this is a nice alternative to the Branch Ergonomic Chair above. The Tempur seat cushion is, perhaps unsurprisingly, wonderfully comfy to sit on for hours at a time. And most chairs that have a thick lumbar cushion end up causing me back pain, but not here—I've had no issues sitting on this chair for a month. The mesh back is nice for airflow, too. The arms tend to move around a bit, though, and the mechanism to adjust them is not elegant. Installation wasn't too hard, but the instructions weren't as simple as Branch's, and the overall build quality feels cheap.

    Knoll Newson for $1,424: This minimalist chair looks best in the graphite and petal colors; it's a bit drab in black and umber. It's nice that I didn't have to fuss with any levers or knobs much—it's comfy out of the box and decently adjustable if you need to make some tweaks—and it feels especially nice when you recline. (The red knob adjusts the tension of the recline, but you need to twist it for five rotations, and I found it hard to turn sometimes.) The Newson didn't give me trouble in the two months I sat in it. I'm just not a huge fan of how the elastomer mesh backrest distorts, depending on how you sit. It feels lumpy. This chair also doesn't let me sit as upright as I'd like, but maybe you're fine with a bit of give. Ultimately, it's the price that pulls it out of our top recommendations, but you do get a 12-year warranty.

    Kelly Clarkson Home Louise Velvet Task Chair for $168: There's absolutely nothing you can adjust on this chair except its height, but it's cute and the seat is comfy. The velvet polyester was surprisingly durable and looked nice even after several weeks of sitting on this chair. The gold finish on the frame and legs chipped off in one area when I was unboxing it—it's frequently under $200, OK? But my biggest issue is that it is not compatible with tall or larger people. My wide shoulders caused my arms to stick out of this chair, making it difficult to type. However, I asked my 5'1" wife to try it, and the chair suited her narrower frame well. She didn't find it hard to use her computer. With a 30-day warranty, you get what you pay for, but this chair is more about aesthetics than anything else. Oh, and Kelly Clarkson because she hand-picked this chair for Wayfair.

    X-Chair X2 K-Sport Management Chair for $969: This used to be our top mesh chair pick, but it has been supplanted by the Steelcase Karman. Sitting in the X-Chair feels like lounging in a hammock. Every part of my body feels well supported, and you can adjust nearly everything on the chair. Pull the seat up and push the armrests up, down, and side to side, or angle them in or out. The lumbar support feels like a cushion, and it adjusts as you move in your seat. If you want to rest your head, you can pay extra for the headrest. It has held up extremely well after three years of near-continuous sitting, but I don't like how bulky it is. X-Chair has several models to choose from. I tested the X-2 K-Sport with the wide seat, and it fits my 6'4" frame well, but it was too wide for my partner, who is 5'1". Most people should be fine with the standard X1.

    Ikea Markus for $300: The Markus is a perfectly fine office chair. It’s not the most comfortable, but it’s far from the worst. The mesh design keeps you cool, and the tall back lets you fully lean into it. It’s rather thin and isn’t obtrusive in a small home office or bedroom. It was annoying to put together (lol, Ikea), and you might need someone to hold up the back of the chair while you properly attach the seat. Unfortunately, if you often sit with at least one leg up or with your legs crossed, the width between the arms will make you uncomfortable.

    X-Chair X-Tech Executive Chair for $1,845: Functionally, the X-Tech is similar to the X-Chair above. In this version, the M-Foam cooling gel seat is indeed wonderful to sit on, though it's not as heat-wicking as the all-mesh X-Chairs. It’s the Brisa Soft Touch material that impresses the most—it’s ridiculously soft. I recommend you stick with the standard armrests instead of the FS 360 armrests, which tend to move about too much. But my biggest gripe with this model is the price. Why on earth does it cost that much?

    Mavix M7 for $777: If it looks strangely similar to the X-Chair (see above), that's because both are owned by the same company. WIRED reviewer Louryn Strampe ran into some issues with assembly, but customer service was able to exchange the model without much effort. The M7 has similarly adjustable armrests and seat angles, but you get wheels that lock. The mesh back and wide seat construction keep you cool and comfortable during sweaty League of Legends sessions, and the lumbar support does the job. If you're short, contact customer support while ordering—Mavix offers shorter cylinders so your feet touch the ground.

    Hon Ignition 2.0 for $477: This chair is easy to set up and looks great, but it gave me really bad back pain, which is why I originally placed it in our “Avoid” section. I thought it was perhaps the long hours I was working, so I switched back to the Knoll Newson Task chair, and my pain quickly began to ease. Sometime later, I gave it a shot again. After a few hours, the pain came back, and switching to another chair dissipated it. Color me confused, because this chair has positive reviews around the web. I then asked a friend who is around 5'4" to try it for a few weeks, and she has had zero issues. This seems to be the answer. It's possible the Ignition doesn't work for my 6'4" self and is better suited for smaller folks.

    Pipersong Meditation Chair for $399: Have a problem sitting in a traditional chair? If your legs need to be bent and twisted for you to be comfortable, you'll want to check this chair out. It has a 360-degree swiveling footstool that can accommodate pretty much any sitting position you want. I can go from kneeling to cross-legged to one leg up, one leg down. It’s possible to sit regularly too, with the footstool behind you and your feet flat on the floor. It's the only chair I've found that's designed for odd sitting habits. There are no armrests, which I didn’t mind because that’s what makes it possible to sit in many of these positions. The actual stool and chair back could stand to be bigger and taller, respectively. I had to use a pillow to keep my back comfy. —Medea Giordano

    Avoid These Chairs

    TopJob Napa

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    If you come across these models, I recommend you save your cash and go for one of the picks above.

    TopJob Napa: The Napa should be $200 or $250 at best, nowhere near its $449 asking price (though it does seem to have a perpetual discount on TopJob's website for $359). It looks attractive, especially in the amber vegan leather. My back surprisingly didn't complain after more than a week of sitting in it for several hours a day. I wouldn't say it's comfy, there's not much plush to the seat and backrest, but it's not too uncomfortable. It doesn't have many points of adjustments—you can adjust the armrest height, lock the recline at a few degrees, and adjust tilt tension. That's it. Technically, you can adjust the headrest, but mine would not stay put at a specific height. You can pull out a footrest, but I found it more gimmicky than useful. The overall quality is a little cheap. You can do better at this price.

    Humanscale World One: Despite hailing from the well-renowned Humanscale, this chair looks quite bland. The setup was fairly quick, and … interesting. You have to hammer two pegs to affix the backrest to the seat, which I've never before had to do, after testing dozens of office chairs. It just feels cheap and a little too plasticky. Like other Humanscale chairs, there are no adjustments to make as the chair will handle it all for you (you can adjust the seat and armrest height). I loved this on the pricier Humanscale Freedom, which felt like someone was cradling my body. But here, I find my body constantly shifting in the all-mesh World One, trying to find a comfy way to recline. The mesh material also feels like it digs in a bit. This could all be because I'm 6'4," as the chair feels like it's better suited for shorter people. However, I think you can do better at this price.

    Herman Miller Vantum: Initially, I liked the Vantum. I liked how I could keep myself in a super upright position, which made me feel more engaged in what I was doing. The mesh backrest also disperses heat quite well. However, the overall build quality feels cheap and doesn’t scream Herman Miller (nor does the asking price, which has since dropped by $200). The headrest isn't great either—I’ve nearly broken it trying to move it up and down. As I kept sitting, it was the back support that disappointed me the most. You can feel the lumbar support on your lower back, and not in a good way, almost like it’s digging in. At least it didn’t give me back pain.

    Vilno Nobel Kneeling Chair

    Photograph: Vilno

    Vilno Nobel Kneeling Chair: It's a freakin' kneeling chair! It was easy to put all the wood pieces together, and the seat cushion was surprisingly plump. This is what's known as an active chair, meant to keep your body moving and keep your posture straight. It feels effective for the first few hours, but unfortunately, rocking in the seat tends to cause it to move around on the floor, so I frequently had to fix my position. Worse yet, my shins and knees grew fatigued, and I started feeling some pain after a few days. You can't adjust its height, so it needs to be paired with a standing desk so that your palms don't rest on your desk.

    Flexispot C7 Lite: While this chair is simple to assemble and looks good, it feels flimsy. The entire back flexes and warps whenever you move, and the lumbar support is barely connected to the rest of the chair, meaning it audibly scratches against the main section of the back every time you adjust and hardly feels like it provides any actual support. The footrest bends whenever weight is put on it, and the foam seat cushion collects crazy amounts of pet hair. It feels like just a few extra screws and supports would have made this a good chair, but in its current state, there isn’t enough material to make it feel sturdy. —Henri Robbins

    Flexispot C7: It wasn't too difficult to put this Flexispot together, and it comes in a fairly compact box despite its size. However, the lumbar section juts out so much that within two days of sitting on it, I had back pain. You can adjust the seat to mitigate it, but it didn't solve the problem. It's not just me. My 5'1" wife did not enjoy sitting on the C7 either.

    Steelcase Series 1: WIRED reviewer Louryn Strampe says her biggest issue with the Series 1 is with the armrest—the tops slide back and forth and side to side, which could be a good thing, except she managed to pinch her arm every time she moved. There's no way to lock them in place, so while she felt supported, her arms weren't. The seat is also pretty curved, which can feel like you're trapped in one position as you work throughout the day.

    Sihoo Doro S300: Former WIRED reviewer Medea Giordano tested the Doro S300, which, in white, looks like it came straight out of the Space Force situation room. She found it comfortable. There are several adjustments you can personalize, like seat depth and recline angle. You can recline quite far, but she says she wishes there were a footrest to enjoy the lowest recline position. She typically prefers a cushy gaming chair, but she says she had no trouble sitting on this chair all day—the dual lumbar support helps too. However, the headrest is too low for her to lean against, even at its max height, and the arms move too easily. Simply placing her arms down pushes them out of position. It's also squeaky and overpriced.

    Palantir Is Extending Its Reach Even Further Into Government

    by: Makena Kelly

    Palantir has become one of the few winners in the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts, offering other contractors a lifeline while consolidating its own reach and power.

    Palantir Is Extending Its Reach Even Further Into Government

    Palantir has become one of the few winners in the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts, offering other contractors a lifeline while consolidating its own reach and power.
    Image may contain Light and Neon
    Photograph: FABRICE COFFRINI/Getty Images

    President Donald Trump’s administration has dramatically expanded its work with Palantir, elevating the company cofounded by Trump ally Peter Thiel as the government’s go-to software developer. Following massive contract terminations for consulting giants and government contractors like Accenture, Booz Allen, and Deloitte, Palantir has emerged ahead. Now the data analytics firm is partnering with those companies—offering them a lifeline while consolidating its own power.

    Palantir has become one of the few winners in the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts, receiving more than $113 million in federal spending since the beginning of the year, according to The New York Times. Palantir’s US government revenue has grown by more than $ 370 million compared to this time last year, according to the company’s most recent quarterly earnings report. Before making remarks at last week’s AI Summit in DC, Trump thanked a variety of cabinet secretaries and tech leaders, including Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar. “We buy a lot of things from Palantir,” Trump said. “Are we paying our bills? I think so.”

    Instead of replacing these more traditional contractors, Palantir’s software is becoming the core tool deployed by them in government systems, placing Palantir in a newly central role.

    The White House itself is thrilled by this partnership: “The Trump Administration has high-standard [sic] when spending American’s hard-earned tax dollars—which is why agencies have partnered with Palantir, a top-tier American company renowned for their longstanding history of innovation, results, and increasing government efficiency,” says White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers.

    Palantir did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

    In April, WIRED reported that Palantir was working alongside IRS engineers to build what sources called a “mega API,” which would unify all data across the agency. An API, or application programming interface, enables applications and databases to exchange data and possibly compare it against other interoperable datasets. Once completed, this mega API could become the “read center of all IRS systems.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracted Palantir for $30 million to track self-deportations in April. The company has also won federal contracts more recently, like a $795 million award from the Pentagon in May to expand its Maven Smart System program. The total contract ceiling for the Army’s Maven program is now $1.3 billion.

    This growth comes as some of the companies Palantir has chosen to partner with have lost billions in government contract cuts. In April, defense secretary Pete Hegseth announced plans to cut $5.1 billion in IT consulting contracts with companies including Accenture, Booz Allen, and Deloitte. In a memo announcing the cuts, Hegseth said that the Pentagon would be forced to bring more of its IT work in-house.

    “These contracts represent non-essential spending on third party consultants to perform services more efficiently performed by the highly skilled members of our DoD workforce using existing resources,” Hegseth wrote.

    Palantir’s partnerships with these companies vary, but each one makes it easier for Palantir to extend the reach of its software and AI technology across the federal government. With Accenture’s government branch, Palantir will train and certify at least 1,000 Accenture workers on its Foundry software as well as its AI tech, according to an Accenture press release The companies also said that together they could create “a 360-degree view” of government agency budgets, something the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has sought to build and use to review federal spending. (Palantir partnered with Accenture before in 2022, but this is the first partnership to focus on US government clients.)

    “We are teaming up with Accenture Federal Services to accelerate AI across the U.S. Government, working to address federal agencies’ highest-priority operational challenges,” Palantir posted to X last month.

    "What makes this partnership so uniquely powerful is Accenture’s expertise working with the federal government and our ability to bring commercial capabilities to government solutions, combined with Palantir’s deep experience in government software," Julie Sweet, chair and CEO of Accenture, said in a press release. “Together, we will harness the ever-growing power of AI to help the federal government succeed in its critical mission to modernize and reinvent its operations—with stronger data flows, transparency and resilience—to better serve warfighters, citizens and all its stakeholders.”

    Accenture did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    While Palantir has become a major government contractor in its own right, partnering with contracting giants could enable the software company to scale at a much faster rate, leveraging long-standing relationships these larger contractors have with virtually every federal agency. “It's actually a pretty savvy business decision on the part of both Palantir, then also what you would call a traditional, more legacy-oriented, like defense or just government contractors,” says Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law at George Washington University. “If they’re newer to certain areas and others have that footprint, that’s how it would benefit Palantir.”

    Last week, Palantir and Deloitte announced a partnership that includes what they call the “Enterprise Operating System” (EOS) to unify data across organizations. At government agencies like the Internal Revenue Service and reportedly at the Social Security Administration (SSA), Palantir is already working to combine agency datasets, allowing what were previously disparate datasets to communicate with one another more easily.

    "Deloitte shares Palantir's commitment to decisive action and a dedication to delivering meaningful, lasting results for commercial and government clients," said Jason Girzadas, Deloitte US CEO, said in a press release announcing the partnership. "Expanding our preferred relationship at this pivotal moment provides our clients with Palantir's latest advances in AI, combined with Deloitte's engineering scale and deep sector experience."

    Deloitte did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Palantir struck some of these deals prior to Trump taking office as well. In December of last year, Booz Allen partnered with Palantir specifically, working together on building out defense IT infrastructure.

    “To have one company monopolize and become the gatekeeper of software in the government, to become an ‘app factory,’ for the government, in a sense, where they're in every agency, they're part of the defense complex and the intelligence complex, brings huge concerns regarding fairness, regarding competition, and puts Palantir in a very unique position that maybe has never existed,” says Juan Sebastián Pinto, a former Palantir employee and critic of the company.

    The Best Mouth Tape (2025)

    by: Nena Farrell

    TikTokkers and biohackers are fast to recommend mouth tape for better sleep. But it’s not a solution for everyone.

    WIRED’s Guide to Mouth Tape

    TikTokkers and biohackers are fast to recommend mouth tape for better sleep. But it’s not a solution for everyone.
    Image may contain Text Number and Symbol
    Courtesy of Dream Recovery

    All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

    I can’t tell you where I first saw mouth tape. Was it while investigating the intense morning shed routines on TikTok? Or perhaps an influencer who insinuated that using mouth tape at night would give me a sharper jawline? (Big shout-out to my algorithm for reminding me about that insecurity.) Nevertheless, it's become a consistent pop-up on my For You page, showing me users raving about how a colorful piece of tape across their mouth is helping them sleep better.

    Mouth tape is exactly what it sounds like: a piece of tape designed to sit across your mouth to keep it closed all night long. Mouth tapers rave about health benefits and better sleep, since it encourages you to breathe through your nose rather than your mouth.

    “Mouth taping is not a gimmick—it’s a reminder to return to the way we’re built to breathe," says Geoffrey Trenkle, a board-certified ENT, head and neck surgeon, and CEO of the Los Angeles Center for Ear, Nose, Throat and Allergy. “For many people, it’s a safe and effective way to promote better sleep and healthier breathing patterns. But if someone experiences nasal blockage, snoring, or disrupted sleep, it’s worth exploring why that’s happening.”

    Mouth tape isn't necessarily a perfect solution to getting a better night's sleep, but if you don't have any airway problems, it can be something worth trying. After sleeping with eight different types of mouth tape and speaking to several experts, I'm here to tell you everything you need to know about mouth tape and which ones are best to try.

    What Is Mouth Tape? What Does It Do?

    Courtesy of Loftie

    Mouth tape is a type of specially designed tape to sit over your mouth, keeping it closed throughout the night to encourage nose breathing over mouth breathing. You shouldn't just grab any kind of tape to use for this; as Andrew E. Colsky, a behavioral sleep medicine clinician and founder of the National Sleep Center, told me, “This is one of those rare instances where duct tape is not the answer.”

    Mouth tape has some breathability to it and is designed to keep your mouth in place without irritating the skin on your lips or around your mouth. There are a few designs, including options with a hole in the middle if you hydrate a lot at night. The book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor suggests you can even use first-aid tape as mouth tape.

    What does it do? It keeps your mouth closed to force you to breathe through your nose rather than your mouth. You might be looking to close your mouth to avoid snoring or drooling, but nasal breathing is overall a good thing. “Nasal breathing plays a critical role in regulating airflow, humidifying air, and supporting optimal oxygen exchange. It also helps maintain pressure in the airways, which can reduce snoring and support better sleep quality for some people,” says Carlos Nunez, chief medical officer at Resmed, a medical device company.

    What Are Mouth Tape’s Benefits?

    Mouth tape is touted as a way to help you sleep better and snore less while sleeping. “It is a method generally intended to promote nasal breathing during sleep, which some believe can enhance sleep quality—though these claims remain largely hypothetical. In theory, keeping the mouth closed may help prevent the tongue from falling back toward the airway, and therefore decrease its potential to rattle (and thus contribute to snoring),” says David Benavides, a board-certified sleep medicine physician at Brigham & Women's Hospital.

    There aren't just sleep benefits; there are some potential health benefits for both your oral health and your overall health. “Nasal breathing can prevent your mouth and throat from drying out, and in return it will prevent bad breath, cavities, and gum inflammation," says Fatima Khan, a practicing dentist, member of the American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine, and cofounder of the oral care line Riven.

    She also says it may help with nitric oxide production in the body, since the primary source of nitric oxide is in the nasal passages. “Nitric oxide aids in regulating blood pressure and improving circulation, which in turn can boost both heart health and lower BP. Also, nitric oxide is significant in regulating insulin, which in return affects your blood sugar levels,” she says.

    What’s So Bad About Mouth Breathing?

    How bad is mouth breathing that people are actually taping their mouths shut? According to one expert, mouth breathing is a bigger problem than you'd expect. “Mouth breathing is wildly unhealthy for any person," says Ben Miraglia, an airway dentist and chief clinical officer at Toothpillow. “There is no amount of mouth breathing that is OK.”

    Mouth breathing can cause issues with sleep and breathing in general. Your nose is designed to filter out debris, allergens, and even tiny insects (thank those nose hairs), and it's designed to give your lungs and throat warmer, more moist air, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Your don’t get these same benefits when you breathe through your mouth. It'll also make you more likely to develop sleep problems like sleep apnea, a sleep disorder where breathing repeatedly stops and starts.

    Miraglia primarily treats children and approaches airway problems from a youth perspective, including larger dental problems, looking at mouth breathing as a problem overall versus just a sleep problem. From a sleep perspective, the interest in mouth breathing usually comes from sleep problems like snoring and sleep apnea, though getting better air all night long (more moist, less debris, etc.) is obviously a big benefit as well.

    Do Doctors Recommend Mouth Tape?

    If you're coming here after hearing an anecdotal story about how mouth taping has made someone's sleep better, you aren't alone in hearing about mouth tape that way. There are no shortages of these videos online, frequently touting a specific tape they used. But for now, it's mainly personal perspectives supporting the narrative. “There is currently extremely limited clinical evidence to support the efficacy of mouth tape in managing sleep disorders," says Benavides. "One small study from 2022, often cited, looked at 20 people with mild sleep apnea. While these participants showed some improvement with mouth tape, the study didn’t include a placebo comparison, and 20 participants is simply not enough to draw solid conclusions.”

    That's not to say it can never be used. Benavides says he has found use for it, even with his obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) patients. Specifically, he has found it useful for OSA patients who want to wear a nasal-only CPAP mask and who could add mouth tape to their nightly setup. "It may help minimize "mouth air leak" (where nasal-entry air escapes through the mouth during therapy) and improve both comfort and adherence. I’ve had success in some individuals," says Benavides.

    Is Mouth Tape Safe?

    If you can breathe comfortably through your nose, mouth tape should be safe to do. Where it gets dicey is if you're trying to use mouth tape to solve a sleep disorder or breathing problems that your nasal passageways might not be able to solve.

    “Mouth tape could potentially cause harm in many others. For example, those with moderate to severe sleep apnea may actually find themselves with even more impaired ability to breathe than before. Worse yet, it may further compromise those with central sleep apnea—a different type of apnea disorder,” says Benavides. “Another group to watch out for are those with impaired nasal breathing, as removing the ability to breathe through the mouth severely restricts their remaining—and often much-needed—airflow path.”

    The takeaway is this: If you can't breathe comfortably on your own through your nose as it is, mouth tape won't fix that for you.

    The Best Mouth Tape We Tried

    Since I have no airway problems, I spent several weeks trying different mouth tapes. I tried them all during the day at my desk to see how they felt and how secure they were, and then I wore the most comfortable and secure options overnight. Overall, I usually got a solid night's sleep when using the tape, but some were less comfortable than others, and I found myself irritated by them and removing them during the night. I also had to skip mouth tape if I had a cold or any kind of postnasal drip, since I have a 3-year-old who brings home a ton of germs. After trying multiple kinds of tape, I had some pretty clear favorites.

    The Best Mouth Tape
    • Photograph: Nena Farrell
    • Courtesy of Dream Recovery

    This is my favorite mouth tape I've tried. Dream says all of its mouth tape uses organic bamboo silk, and while there aren't any certifications on its site to back that up, the Plus+ tape is super soft and flexible on my face, easily the softest I tried. It still feels plenty secure and breathable with that softness and was an easy favorite after my testing.

    Another Great Set
    • Photograph: Nena Farrell
    • Photograph: Nena Farrell

    This set was also really comfortable, with a softer texture and a larger shape that will fit all kinds of lip sizes. It is very feminine in its design and comes in a couple different shades. This set promises to hold overnight skin care products, and I tested this tape with the Laniege Lip Sleeping Mask ($24) on my lips and found it stayed on when I used both together.

    More Mouth Tape We Tried

    Photograph: Nena Farrell

    Here are the other mouth tapes I tried. All prices are based on a one-month supply.

    Dream Recovery Mouth Tape for $34: I like this one because it has a wide and tall design, but the Plus+ version is so much softer. This one feels pretty coarse.

    Heronlink Micropore Premium Tape for $17: This is at the top of Amazon's recommended mouth tapes, and it's a fine option. It's secure on my face, but the opening in the middle allowed for me to resume mouth breathing pretty easily.

    Hostage Tape for $20: This tape was solid to wear all night long, but I found that it was most likely to leave bits of the tape on my face. It's another popular one I see recommended often online, but it wasn't tremendously better than any others I tested.

    Loftie Mouth Tape for $30: This set is pretty comfortable, and I like the small opening for a water straw without giving me too much wiggle room. But it left behind the most sticky residue after using it, and the design of this tape is a little Ronald McDonald for my liking.

    Longevity Sleep Tape for £8: I loved this tape. I loved it almost as much as the Dream and Say Less I recommend above, and it's definitely one of the most secure tapes without being too restrictive or coarse. It has a nice lavender-scented option that comes in purple, plus black and beige options that are both unscented. It's only available in the UK, though.

    The Skinny Confidential for $39: I found myself removing this tape during the night. It has an opening like the Loftie above, but didn't feel quite as secure, and the more feminine shape wasn't as wide as the Say Less option to fit more lip sizes. It did come with a cute little case for my bedside.

    Queen Tape for $13: This tape is comfortable, and I constantly see it advertised on TikTok, but I didn't find the adhesive secure. It started peeling off my face almost immediately during my daytime wear tests.

    VIO2 Unscented Mouth Tapes for $27: This has a different style of design, with an H-style look to it versus tape that covers a minimal amount of your skin. You could wear it different ways, but I found the H-style position the most secure. I didn't like it as much as full tape designs, but this is a good option if you want security without full coverage.

    So, Does It Work?

    After trying so many mouth tapes, the question remained: Did they work? Did I sleep better and wake up more rested?

    Honestly, not really. I had the same kind of sleep I would without mouth tape: better, deeper sleep on days I had more physical activity and kept to my routines better, and worse sleep on nights after I forgot to go outside and do anything beyond hunch over a screen (she says as she types at her desk, staring at yet another screen). Some nights I woke up and ripped the mouth tape off in irritation, other nights I slept all night long with it on my face. Some nights I had to take it off at 3 in the morning because my toddler was up yet again, so the inconsistency could be me and my own daily routines.

    But I also wonder if that's everyone's issue. Did they have an inconsistent bedtime routine, and now adding something that makes them mentally prepared for bedtime is what's changing their life? Perhaps it's not the tape so much as the need for a bedtime routine to tell their body and mind it's time for bed. There's no way to be sure if that's the secret benefit of mouth tape, but it is known that a good bedtime routine to wind down before bed makes for better sleep.

    What Else Can You Try?

    If you're looking for other solutions to help with nasal breathing, mouth tape isn't the only option. Trenkle recommends a handful of different medical and lifestyle changes. “Saline rinses, nasal steroid sprays, and allergy management can dramatically improve nasal function,” he says. "Tools like nasal dilators or strips can also help keep the nose open during sleep. For patients with sleep apnea or structural airway issues, we offer targeted therapies—from oral appliances to surgical solutions—depending on the diagnosis.”

    Meet the Experts

    Uber’s Drive to Become the Kleenex of Robotaxis

    by: Aarian Marshall

    It doesn’t matter who makes the tech—when you call a robocar, Uber’s mission now is to make sure you use its app.

    Uber’s Drive to Become the Kleenex of Robotaxis

    It doesn’t matter who makes the tech—when you call a robocar, Uber’s mission now is to make sure you use its app.
    Image may contain Transportation Vehicle and Car
    Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

    At a 2015 event, then-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick pondered aloud the future of his ride-hail company in a world of self-driving cars. There were still a ways off, he acknowledged—five or 10 or 15 years. But to him, Uber’s role was clear. "Are we going to be part of the future?" he said. "Or are we going to resist the future, like that taxi industry before us? For us, we're a tech company, so we've said, let's be part of that.”

    Kalanick isn’t at the head of Uber anymore, but the specter of disruption remains. Ten years later, self-driving vehicle companies that mostly didn’t exist in 2015 are readying robotaxis for passenger rides. Moreover, nearly every player in the currently hot robot car space has something in common: They’ve signed a deal with Uber.

    Yes, really. Take a look:

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    It’s the classic “throwing spaghetti on the self-driving cars to see what sticks” strategy. Uber’s interest in self-driving makes a ton of sense. The business estimates it spends $2 per mile to have a pesky human behind the wheel, and Dara Khosrowshahi, Kalanick’s replacement, said in a recent interview that Uber pays drivers a global average of 80 percent of riders’ fares. (Many drivers believe Uber takes much more.)

    How much more money could Uber made if robots did the driving? “We think it’s an enormous, enormous long-term opportunity,” Khosrowshahi said.

    This year alone, Uber has announced tie-ups with China’s Baidu, Pony.ai, and Momenta; Volkswagen; the Michigan-based developer May Mobility; and this month, the Bay Area self-driving vehicle company Nuro and Arizona EV manufacturer Lucid, who together say they’ll launch 20,000 robotaxis over the next six years, starting in a US city next year.

    As the world, and the taxi business, hints at big changes on the roads, Uber seems poised to maintain its status as the Kleenex of ride-hail, a name brand synonymous with an entire category. It's inconsequential who builds the tech—when you call a robocar, Uber wants you to use its app.

    “To them, it doesn’t really matter who ultimately succeeds,” says Sam Abuelsamid, who writes about the self-driving-vehicle industry and is the vice president of marketing at Telemetry, a Michigan research firm. “If you’ve got a car that works and can drive safely, you’re welcome to come onto Uber and provide rides.”

    Still, it’s too early to say whether the Kleenex gambit will work.

    Plenty has changed since 2015. Kalanick is no longer at Uber, deposed by a hostile board in 2017. The company marked a grim milestone in 2018 when one of its own testing self-driving vehicles struck and killed a woman. The incident, for which federal investigators later found the ride-hail giant partially responsible, led to a suspension and then reorganization of Uber’s self-driving development effort.

    In 2020, Uber sold off its autonomous vehicle unit to a competitor. In some ways, though, this asset-light existence—where Uber serves as the middleman for drivers and riders, without owning its own (robo)car—seems to have worked for the company. Under the guidance of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the company finally recorded its first profit last year.

    One potential issue for Uber is that its particular role in the autonomous vehicle industry won’t be super useful for a while. Uber is powerful because it’s already on the phones of some 160 million active monthly users all over the world. The company is good at matching people driving cars with those millions of people who want rides. But there likely won’t be millions of robotaxis for a while.

    Waymo, the US leader in robotaxis, has about 1,500 vehicles operating in five cities. Baidu says its next city, Dubai, will have 100 robotaxis by the end of this year. “This is a marketplace that for quite some time will be supply constrained, not demand constrained,” says Len Sherman, a professor at Columbia Business School who has written about Uber. Self-driving car developers want access to Uber’s network—but because there simply aren’t that many self-driving cars, the company is less useful in the near-term.

    This leads to another potential issue: Uber may have less power to get a big chunk of each fare in the robotaxi world. The company has spent billions figuring just how much they need to pay individual drivers to take on fares. Robotaxi tech developers who have spent their own billions building self-diving software will likely look to take a bigger portion of each fare. After all, companies including Tesla and Waymo run their own ride-hail apps. Do they really need Uber? “I guarantee they’ll drive a harder bargain,” says Sherman. (A spokesperson for Uber didn’t provide financial details of its existing partnerships.)

    Chinese Uber competitor Didi—which acquired Uber’s China business in 2016—seems to be following the old Uber self-driving playbook. It has its own autonomous vehicle technology subsidiary, which is building autonomous vehicle software. It said last year that it would work with EV firm GAC Aion to mass produce robotaxis starting this year.

    It may be that Uber hasn’t totally closed the door on owning some of its own robotaxi tech. Earlier this summer, the New York Times reported that Kalanick was back, and in talks to acquire the US arm of the Chinese AV company Pony.ai—with a financial assist from Uber. A spokesperson for Pony.ai declined to comment on the report. Uber told the Times that it plans to work with many AV players globally. The Kleenex strategy, in other words.

    One company is conspicuously missing from the tall stack of Uber’s autonomy partnership press releases, of course. In a February interview, Uber CEO Khosrowshahi seemed to indicate that’s not for lack of trying. Tesla appears to want to own its whole self-driving car operation: the technology, the cars, the maintenance, and the app that powers it—but Uber could still be a great robotaxi partner, Khosrowshahi said. “Ultimately, we’re hoping that my charm and the economic argument gets Tesla to work with us as well,” he said.